DNA Painter Tree

Did you see all of the prettily colored trees on various Genealogy Facebook groups this last week? Jonny Perl created a new tool on DNA Painter: Trees. 

With the new trees feature, one can create ancestral charts in pedigree, fan and text view. What makes this tool unique is the ability to mark common DNA ancestors and then see a visual representation of those matches on the chart.

I tried doing something similar with my DNA Circles. I printed out a fan chart and then used a highlighter to mark the various circles I had.

With DNA Painter, I get a similar chart showing my genetic genealogy.

This chart was very easy to create. My first step was to create a GEDCOM file from my genealogy software, RootsMagic. 

Pull down the FILE menu and select EXPORT

On the GEDCOM Export window, pull down the tab that says EVERYONE and change it to ANCESTORS ________ (name of home person in the database)

In the 'Data to Export' area, I unchecked everything but the SOURCES. I discovered that if I clicked to Privatize Living People in RootsMagic, then I couldn't find myself in DNA Painter to set the home person for the tree. Thus, I recreated my gedcom without privatizing the living people.

Click OK - AND PAY ATTENTION TO WHERE FILE IS SAVED.

Go to DNA Painter and login. Click on TREES in the menu across the top.

On the TREES page, Click on the CREATE NEW TREE button. (The button may be toward the right side of the screen if you don't have a tree.)

Read thru the information on the "Welcome to DNA Painter Trees.

When finished reading about the trees, close the Welcome window. An 'Untitled Tree' will appear on the screen. If desired, one could manually enter the information into the tree. To upload a GEDCOM file, locate the LOAD GEDCOM link on the right side of the Tree screen.

Follow the prompts to locate and import your GEDCOM file.

Since most of my known cousin matches are on Ancestry, I'm working with my Ancestry Common Ancestor matches to complete my tree on DNA Painter.

In my DNA Painter Tree, I hovered over one of my Common Ancestors. A pop-up menu opened that allowed me to 'mark' that ancestor as a DNA match.

If I click on the VIEW/EDIT button, it will open a window providing details about the ancestor.

Clicking on the EDIT OR ADD NOTES button opens another screen allowing me to add a note.

Since I'm using my Ancestry matches to build this genetic genealogy tree, I added a note indicating that Ancestry is the source of my DNA information. If my tree were private, I could add the identities of those DNA matches to the NOTES field.

Within a few minutes, I was able to begin my Genetic Genealogy Tree. 

This is a FANTASTIC addition to my DNA toolbox!