DNA Resources at DNA Painter Website

DNA Painter is a very cool website with a couple of different tools that can be used by people who have tested their DNA. Thank you to Jonny Perl who has put together these wonderful tools! In fact, he just won the RootsTech DNA Innovation Contest. See fellow geneablogger, Jill Ball, interview him at her YouTube channel.

To use the DNA Painter feature, testers have to have results from a company that provides a chromosome browser (FamilyTreeDNA, 23andMe, MyHeritage) or have uploaded their AncestryDNA results to the free GEDmatch.com. The goal of using DNA Painter is to know from which ancestor a particular segment came from. Then, when an unknown DNA match approaches me wondering how we are related, I can look at the chromosome(s) where we match and narrow down which ancestral line I should be looking at to find our common ancestor.

Having known second and third cousins in your match lists at these DNA websites is very helpful for this project.

This is the home page of DNA Painter, showing an example of seven (of 23) chromosomes and how the user "mapped" his chromosomes to different ancestors, using the tools at the website and data from one of the above-mentioned websites. Look at all those names and colors!

The following screenshot shows 19 of my 23 chromosomes. Sadly, I have many fewer names and colors. The key in the lower right hand corner is hard to read:

Pale blue: Frances Adelaide McAlpin (my paternal great-grandmother)
Blue: Charles McAlpin Pyle, Sr. (my paternal grandfather, and son of Frances Adelaide)
Green: Lowell Townsend Copeland (my maternal grandfather)

The several small pieces of blue appear because I have several second cousins on my paternal grandfather's side (Pyle-McAlpin) who have tested. I might match one cousin on chromosomes 2, 11, and 15, and another cousin on chromosomes 1, 3, and 19; the color shows where we match, not necessarily the entire segment that I inherited from my paternal grandfather.

The light blue comes from match to a McAlpin second cousin 1x removed and a third cousin. This DNA came from my great-grandmother to me through my grandfather, Charles McAlpin Pyle, but the light blue shows that it came from his mother, Frances Adelaide, rather than from his father, James Tolman Pyle. The green segments come from a first cousin of my mother's.

If you decide you want to try this, be sure to first watch Blaine Bettinger's video explaining it.

Because I have two full siblings, visual phasing helps me get a lot further with chromosome painting, but it takes a lot longer to do the analysis (see DNA ~ Visual Phasing to read about my use of this technique). I still need more second cousins who have tested at AncestryDNA (which does not have a chromosome browser) to upload their raw data to GEDmatch to help me paint my chromosomes and to complete my Visual Phasing analysis.

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The other helpful tool at this website is the interactive version of the Shared cM Project (See Blaine Bettinger's The Genetic Genealogist for an explanation.) (Version 3.0 is the current one.) When you see that you match a certain number of centimorgans (cM) with a DNA match, you can enter that number in the box and see the list of possible relationships that you and your match might have.

AncestryDNA does tell you how many total cM you share with your matches and I have many matches there who match me at about 30 cM. Following is the list of relationship probabilities.

With the very good probability that I am a fifth or sixth or seventh cousin to these many matches, our common ancestor likely lived in the 18th century, and with three of my four grandparents having ancestors who lived in New England in the 18th century, it's quite a challenge to determine how we're related. Viewing these matches on a chromosome browser where I have identified which grandparent or great-grandparent I have gotten that DNA from (using the DNA Painter tool or the Visual Phasing strategy) helps narrow down which ancestral line I should be looking at.