Living DNA update

[kiterunner]

If you have uploaded your DNA to Living DNA (partnered with Findmypast), you should check your DNA matches because they have recently done an update which means you should have lots more matches than you did before.

Unfortunately their default for displaying the match's name is initials only unless the person has gone into their profile to set a display name. If you haven't done this then you should. It's not very useful to see a list of matches with initials only, and no family trees yet!

As far as I know, they haven't sent emails out to members telling them about the update. Unless it has gone into my spam folder.

[kiterunner]

Ah, it's showing mostly full names of matches now, thank goodness. Might actually be some use now.

[kiterunner]

And they must have done another update today, because my number of matches has gone up by about 10%. Unfortunately, sorting by Date Added doesn't bring to the top those who weren't on the list before, so I suppose I will have to go through them one by one.

[kiterunner]

Living DNA has at last added a chromosome browser, currently in beta testing. Sorry to say it doesn't include the X and Y chromosomes.

[kiterunner]

From having a quick look at a couple of my DNA matches, I can see that they include very small segments (even less than 4 cM) which other sites would ignore.

[Glen TK]

I believe it's free if you tested with them but not if the test was uploaded from elsewhere?

[kiterunner]

I uploaded from Ancestry and I have the chromosome browser for free but I think it depends on when you uploaded.

[Mary from Italy]

From having a quick look at a couple of my DNA matches, I can see that they include very small segments (even less than 4 cM) which other sites would ignore.

You can adjust the minimum number on most sites (definitely MyHeritage, GedMatch and DNA Painter, can't remember if you can with FTDna), but I'm not sure it's a good idea to go so low.

[kiterunner]

No, I think it is a bad idea.

[kiterunner]

For instance, the DNA match who comes up 3rd on my list, supposedly 2nd - 4th cousin with 55.40 cM of DNA shared with me, I can now see that the shared DNA is split between 9 segments, and only 2 of those are over 8 cM, 2 just over 6 cM and the other 5 are below 6 cM. Most of those segments should be ignored.

[Mary from Italy]

Yes, exactly.

[Glen TK]

I do find it a bit odd that the number of shared segments isn't shown when clicking a name but it is shown for the shared matches.

For example my best match is BG, 0.97% DNA shared (70.31 cM but no segment information). He has one shared match PC, it's only when I click on PC that I can see BG and myself share DNA across 6 segments.

BG is also on Ancestry (40cM across 4 segments) and on MH (69.1?cM across 5).

I have around 450 matches and have spotted a few that are also Ancestry users. I've messaged a few on both sites but not had replies. To access the new feature would cost me £19 but at present I just can't see it is worthwhile, I just don't have the quality or quantity of matches and there's no way to tell if someone is active or not.
Based on some results on MH I have a fair number of 30-50cM American and Australian matches in the big pile up region on chr 15.