Monday, January 7, 2019

The ironing's not done ....

.... and it's all Shelley Crawford's fault.

Since she wrote about her network graphs for Visualising Ancestry Matches last year last year I have been hooked. Shelley posted detailed  instructions for creating these very useful visual representations of one's Ancestry matches (and beyond 4th cousin level too). What was easy for a cluey chick like Shelley was hard labour for this old girl. I persevered and created my first graph which helped me work out a few connections.

Since I created my first masterpiece my number of Ancestry matches has grown greatly. In October before I went on holidays I started the process again but it took me ages and my resulting graph looked like a dog's breakfast.

Shelley must have realised that there were quite a few people like me who didn't really have the patience and persistence to create these useful things because in December she announced her ConnectedDNA service. For a small fee one can avoid the headaches associated with creating network graphs by contracting Shelley to do the dirty work for you.

I placed my order and coughed up my $80 on Saturday. I was sent a link to upload some files to Dropbox for Shelley to work on. When I opened my email Sunday morning my files were waiting for me.   I received four files : the most amazing spreadsheet that listed all my matches with lots of relevant data, my very pretty network graph in two formats (.pdf and .jpg) and  a group map that gives an overview of my pretty graphs.

My pretty graph looks something like this but it also has names on each of the dots
The pretty graphs show clusters of relationships of my matches so I can see at a glance who matches with whom and therefore deduce where in my tree a relationship may be (very handy for those matches who are treeless and have meaningless kit names).

I love the spreadsheet and have gone down a rabbit hole today adding the notes from my own basic sheet of matches into Shelley's.  I have already been able to work out where a few more matches fit into my tree. I'm so impressed that I want to order graphs for all of the kits I match on Ancestry and FTDNA but I had better work with what I have and save up some pennies for more graphs from ConnectedDNA.

Perhaps I could even do some ironing.


5 comments:

Kerrie Anne Christian said...

Jill
Have you also tried DNAGedcom.com's Collins Leeds tool that was introduced about mid December ?

It only does down to 4th cousins - but still a really nice representation and I've broken down a significant brick wall using this tool.

GeniAus said...

I saw that on the DNAGedcom site. Will give it a go...just need TIME

Kerrie Anne Christian said...

Jill
I'd agree about time availability - so I just run DNAGedcom in the background on my computer to generate the 3 spreadsheets including ICW in common with excel spreadsheet, and I do something else in the meantime.
I've used DNAGedcom for Ancestry and FamilyTreeDNA results - MyHeritage wasn't working so well last time I tried, but I heard they were working on it

Once the 3 spreadsheets are done on Ancestry results, then running the Collins Leeds option only takes a few minutes mostly - it utilises the ICW excel spreadsheet already generated.

BTW you can reset Collins Leeds beyond the standard parameters
eg I reset it from 400cms up to 1000 cms to include my first cousins, and from 50cms down to 20 cms to take it down to all my 4th cousin matches on Ancestry

it's worth a look when you can get into the GeneaCave again - it's a really cool tool. I'm running it on my cousins' results as well.

GeniAus said...

Thanks Kerrie-Anne.

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