MRCA Search Tool on Gedmatch

6 generations of McBees, Willises and Smiths

Don't Forget to Check GEDmatch

While continuing to build the trees of my McBee DNA matches, I thought about two parts of GEDmatch that allow me to search for my mother's matches, even though she died years before autosomal testing was available. Both of the tools featured here are "Tier 1" tools, which means you need to pay for a month or more to use them. 

GEDmatch - Free and Paid

My mother's kit, LX517332, is a "Lazarus" kit which I created from the kits of my sister and myself, my father, me mom's brother, and all the cousins I could persuade to upload to GEDmatch. The reason my father's kit is part of the construction is that GEDmatch compares his data to that of my sister and me, and removes our matches to him, which leaves the DNA that we inherited from her. Even after my Tier 1 membership is over, I still have my mom's kit, along with my "super kit" which combines all of my autosomal kits together, so I get the maximum number of SNPs to compare to others.

GEDCOMs Too

As you may know, along with uploading your DNA raw data to GEDmatch, you can (and in my opinion, should) upload your GEDCOM, and connect it to your DNA kit. You will need to do this one kit at a time, one GEDCOM per kit. There is no reason to keep more than one DNA kit public, and in fact it is better to make any extra kits for any one person "research" kits. This allows you to still use them, but does not clutter up results for you and your matches.

Tonight I thought of trying out a tool that was released about a year ago, called the MRCA Search Tool to see what it would find for her. 

MRCA--Most Recent Common Ancestor

This is their description of the tool:

This program compares a family tree of the primary kit with the family trees of all of the closest DNA matches that also have family trees. It uses a pretty generous matching algorithm, so please don't take these findings as absolutely proven. It is very possible that this program will, in some cases, wrongly identify common ancestors. So PLEASE do a little bit of follow-up investigation to confirm the findings before accepting them as correct. Hopefully, in time, we will reduce the number of false matches. We feel it's better, for now, to be a little loose in the matching and catch common ancestors with slight variations in spelling and have occasional false matches, than to miss real matches. We hope this allows you to find out how you are related to other GEDmatch users.

 

Leaving out the names and emails, here is part of her output:

Partial output of GEDmatch MRCA Finder Tool for Lola McBee Cowan

 Two of these matches seem useful to investigate, since William I. Disney is one of her ancestors, as is John Triplett. I would not be surprised if all are valid matches, since I recognize most of the names - but 21 generations seems like a bit of a stretch. Sites which allow you to compare GEDCOMs are rare! The only other one I know is Geneanet, and their tool is for paying members only.

When I clicked the "Compare GEDCOMs" link, I was taken to a series of possible matching persons, with fields from my GEDCOM and the other. For each person's profile I could report that it was a match -- most of them seemed almost identical, so I reported them a match. Those with different information might still be a match, but I didn't report "match." Here is a sample:

One of the possible GEDCOM profile matches; mine above, the other below

GEDmatch Free Tools

I started with the free tools, especially with a large match with my mother's kit that I somehow overlooked before. I started one of my favorites, "Kits that match one or both of two kits" which also wins the Strangest Name for a Tool prize! It is a wonderful way to figure out where in your tree that close match might be. Be sure to always check possible matches with the one-to-one tool; I found two promising matches to my mother who shared no DNA, in spite of what the one-to-many tool reported.

Focus

I'm not going to follow up on any of these leads for now, since I'm focusing on Mom's McBees. However, in my quest to look for relatives and sources of information *everywhere* I thought it useful to check GEDmatch. 

I'm making use of the FAN club (Family/Friends, Associates, Neighbors) more and more as I move back in time. Already I've found that I need to follow up not just on the McBees, but also the Willises and the Smiths. As other sources thin out, I'm going to be relying more and more on land and court records and hope to find more tax lists too. And I've already found a splendid probate file on Ancestry.com which has been downloaded and put into a folder. Those pages have clarified Angeline McBee's timeline a great deal. And I've been sharing my findings with my McBee Genealogy online group as I go, so it's partially written up. 

Thanks to South King Genealogical Society for providing me so much education in these genealogy and family history concepts and research methodology. The GPS (Genealogical Proof Standard) really keeps me on track and focused.

I hope you find these tools useful in your own research, and I hope you will write up what you are doing to share here on the blog!

Valorie Cowan Zimmerman