Gathering Autosomal Data

VERY EARLY DRAFT PAGE THAT IS IN DEVELOPMENT

Different test companies have non-overlapping sets of testers unique to their customer base. MyHeritage, for example, has a much stronger appeal and in-roads to many non-North American users. FTDNA has attracted surname study testers who then simply do their autosomal test work there also. As a result, there is a strong interest to do cross-site analysis and match study. Not to mention that maybe the test company site is not employing the latest and greatest available tools to analyze their own test results. For whatever the reasons, there is a large crowd that work to use 3rd Party Tools on either their desktop computer or the cloud that is accessible via a browser. This page attempts to capture the details of what is working today and other best practices to supporting this type of effort.

Early on, the push was to get matches to transfer their results to a popular 3rd Party Tool named GEDMatch. Now-a-days, it is more focused around using the desktop tool GenomeMate Pro with a future glint toward the upcoming, new, online tool Genetic.Family. Key is, these tools need to be fed and care must be taken as to how you gather and feed them; especially for continued maintenance of your analysis over time as you update from the source data.

The focus here is not how to extract the RAW data file of autosomal SNPs from one test company and upload it into another (or possibly 3rd party tool like GEDMatch). But more how to extract the match lists and shared matches along with segment match data (when available) and pedigree trees to then combine and analyze. A key difference is this is gathering the data that is the result of analyzing the match database. Something each tester has available to themselves without asking for the matches RAW Data file (or asking it be transferred to another tool).

GenomeMate Pro is not the only tool that can be fed. The multitude of new clustering tools all need to be fed the same match list data.

Add tabs per test company and then discuss the techniques to feed each tool within the tab for that company.

No Tabs

23andMe

AncestryDNA

This is the key and important tab. As Ancestry is by far the largest DNA test database. And the only company that does not provide segment match data. Thus your only recourse is to resort to exclusively match list analysis techniques.

FamilyTreeDNA

LivingDNA

To date, there is no real match list database to extract from LivingDNA. Either because there are not enough testers and matches. Or others have not uploaded kits to the site from other test companies they support. We are still awaiting a full development of their tools the way MyHeritage and FamilyTreeDNA jumped into it. So really, your only solution here is to gather your RAW Data File and transfer it to GEDMatch for use and inclusion there. We will update this section if it changes in the future.

MyHeritage

Amazingly, MyHeritage provides support to grab much of the basic data you want pretty easily. In the three vertical dot button to the right of the DNA Matches page, you have an option to ask for a complete match list and a complete segment match list. MyHeritage, like for their clustering product, will take the request and email you the file within an hour (usually). The gather tools will all read this file and pre-populate their database. See the details below as to what is captured by the MyHeritage provided solution and what can be further gathered by the gather tools. Otherwise, the gather tools simply become a "rewrite" tool to change the CSV provided by MyHeritage to the form required by the analysis tools they support uploading too. To date, the gathering tools either never complete, or simply do not gather anything additional beyond what MyHeritage supplies. But read the details below for more information on each gather tool and the nuances.

NGG Geno2.0

NGG is now defunct and, if you had not already grabbed your RAW Data file, there is no hope of getting it anymore. The Geno 2.0 product included a full autosomal test product in addition to their extensive yDNA SNP product. They never added a match list capability to see autosomal matches. While the extensive yDNA SNP results could be uploaded to FTDNA, there was no direct path for the autosomal RAW Data file. Many found simple ways to change the RAW Data file (simply a text .CSV spreadsheet) to upload it to other sites though. Similar to a RAW Data file dump and upload done with other test companies. As this section is not focused on RAW Data file transfers, this capability will not be covered here. Needless to say, if you had grabbed your RAW Data File before the service and website stopped, you should work to upload it to the other test companies that accept results from others; like FTDNA, MyHeritage and GEDMatch. We only mention them as historically, many may have these files for those that tested there. Note that only Geno 2.0 had the full autosomal product. If you tested with the original Geno, then there is no autosomal data to analyze.