New Matches Coming In

[auntsha]

Matches

Husband 16 gain
Son. 18
Daughter. 12
Daughter. 13
Myself. 8
My husband lost 5 pages, Son lost 3, 1 daughter lost 2 pages, 1 daughter gained a page. That is a lot of lost matches at 10 a page.
My husband and children continue to get mostly Jewish matches and of course cannot connect as the names are not familiar as we didn't know he had a Jewish in his Ancestry. We do figure now his Gr Grandmother was probably Jewish but have not seen her Surname in anyone's tree. Ancestry is also giving him mostly Eastern Euro Jewish matches so can't be a mistake.

[nolnacsj]

Still some bugs to be worked out

There are a few bugs that need to be worked out regarding the new matches so folks should wait a few days for FTDNA to address these and refine before considering that your results are in their final form. I understand that they are aware and working on it.

A few things needed some additional tweaking initially back in 2011 when the Affy to Illumina conversion occurred too.

Judy

[Donald Locke]

I lost 5 pages of matches, but gained a few very interesting matches!
One of my FF matches lists the Lock surname, so I just emailed them to see if their Lock ancestor might be one of my ancestors.

I look forward to seeing any and all new results over the next month, should prove interesting.

[mixedkid]

My parents each gained 6 new matches; I gained 7. Each of us though, lost at least 10 long-held matches overall. Some of those lost were wonderful communicators!

As an aside: No change in Population Finder results. I didn't expect any but just thought I'd pass that information on to readers.

The mystery distant cousins still appear, but it's nice to see new cousins from old reliable categories: Quebec and Kentucky origins. (It seems I noticed these same categories right away at Ancestry and 23 and Me as well.)

[ursus]

That certainly was a change. I lost about 300 in total, down to under 1500 now, but I got 97 new ones. There are changes at all levels of match. Since I am an Ashkenazic Jew, and relationships were very overpredicted before and still are, I can't really find any fault with this.

[Lklundin]

not one of my new matches (Feb) have gedcoms attached to them. Checked my other kits that I administer and none of those new matches have gedcoms.

I only upload my GEDCOM _after_ FTDNA make the raw data available for download.

Once the matches come, I don't have to worry if the matches where doctored up based on the GEDCOM.

Yes, it is good to trust each other. But it is even better when you don't have to.

Anybody who disagrees is welcome to lend me some money. You can trust me to pay you back.

PS. With the massive load on the FTDNA servers, it may be better to postpone that GEDCOM upload just a little longer. I cannot even download the raw data on my FF from batch 498 yet.

[Donald Locke]

Interestingly, not one of my new matches (Feb) have gedcoms attached to them. Checked my other kits that I administer and none of those new matches have gedcoms. 2 pages each of new matches, and nobody uploaded a gedcome? All the old ones that had gedcoms still have them. It's just the new matches from this batch don't have any. Anybody else have any matches from this batch that have attached gedcoms?

Mlawton, your not going to like what I have to say, but I am going to say it!

No one and I mean NO ONE out side my family gets a copy of my gedcom file.
FTDNA provides us with a Surname Field that we can fill in if we wish to, which I have already done, but I do not share my family tree gedcom file with ANYONE!

There can be many reasons as to why some people refuse to upload a gedcom file. 1. privacy rights, 2. ethnicity, 3. identify theft, 4. just plain none of your business who we are related to lol.

Just seems to me that you haven't given a moments thought as to why some people refuse to share much information with you, a total stranger.
You seem to fail to comprehend that many peoples fled to the USA because they had to endure racial hate crimes commited against them and their family's back in their home lands. Many peoples do not want their entire family trees being exposed through a gedcom file for fear they or their family members will have to endure those hate crimes again.

What you are wanting is totally unfair to many peoples who do not want their family trees being openly exposed to total strangers.

[Lklundin]

not one of my new matches (Feb) have gedcoms attached to them. Checked my other kits that I administer and none of those new matches have gedcoms.

My previous post on the topic is somewhat contrived, since I believe most users refrain from uploading due to a different reason, namely a perceived privacy issue.

It is however important to keep in mind that like any other science, genealogy works only with an open mind.

So yes, you have to respect the privacy of your living relatives and refrain from distributing information about them to strangers.

But other than that, you are seriously limiting your potential for results, if you do not share your genealogical information.

Just to prove I am not all talk, here is my GEDCOM (compressed with bzip2):

http://www.lklundin.dk/lkl/lklundin.ged.bz2

More than 3.000 (!) genealogists have trusted me with their GEDCOMs.

The reason is that I have used my knowledge of math and computer science to write a _very_ robust GEDCOM matcher. I gave the first version of the software away for free, but the users had a hard time getting it to work right.

So instead I perform the GEDCOM comparison for genealogists who mail me their GEDCOMs. The GEDCOMs are not distributed or searchable to the public, so people can only get matches by sending their GEDCOMs to me.

To date I have sent 274.180 email notifications to genealogists who have overlapping research.

So yes, you can guard your own little pool of data and have it remain exactly that, little.

Or you can come out in the open world and experience what sharing can lead to.

[Lklundin]

many peoples who do not want their family trees being openly exposed

This sounds like a bit of a trollish straw man, but I will bite.

To protect your privacy, you have to do it right.

And that does not preclude you from exposing a GEDCOM to the public.

So let's say my admixture is so despised it is basically the reason affirmative action was introduced.

I am also a woman, homosexual, communist, ex-scientology, ex-muslim and Jewish. And I am secretly in love with my sister, who is a minor.

Because I am paranoid, I imagine that _everybody_ has a reason to hate, kill, rape or just harass me.

And I am of royal descent to top it of. So no one can know about me.

But I still want to do genealogy.

But how?

1) Order FTDNA kit under a different name with a friend (so I need one person who does not hate me) paying for and receiving the kit.
2) Create a GEDCOM with myself and all my known ancestors, where my name is replaced by 'me', my fathers name by 'father' and so on, say for two, three generations.
3) Upload the GEDCOM-file and exchange information about the long deceased ancestors.

[Solothurn]

179 down to 125

Two Affymetrix (remember that?) matches have returned that disappeared with the original Illumina chip upgrade!

Now do we contact our matches or will some disappear when the chip is upgraded again?

[T E Peterman]

I remember the Affy to Illumina upgrade & it had a similar impact. Later, they tweaked their algorithm & many of the "lost" matches reappeared. They tweaked it again last summer & something similar happened.

I know their algorithms aren't handling Build 37 data properly because the Chromosome Browser report for my father & I is totally messed up, and it was perfect before. Now, my father & I share no segments on chromosomes 2 & 22, even when looked at as downloaded data. About half of the other chromosomes show that we match on the whole thing, but the shared segment is off of the chromosome at the right end.

Once Family Tree DNA fixes their algorithms (I reported this in their Contact Us box), this anomaly will likely disappear. Until then, I'm not trusting any of the changes from yesterday (gains or losses) as being accurate.

Timothy Peterman

[auntsha]

Matches

T E Peterman
Thanks for explaining about missing matches. Appreciate everyone else's input too. It seems I have a question about something and someone else is posting the answer!

[Lklundin]

they tweaked their algorithm

At this time FTDNA need more than tweaking of their algorithm.

One of my new "matches" has a segment with a start location higher than the end location (130mB -> 7mB).

On the chromosome browser this segment appears on the right of i.e. outside the chromosome.

Perhaps it is better to leave the FTDNA accounts in peace for a couple of weeks.

Hopefully by that time, the data FTDNA provide can be trusted. This does not appear to be the case just now.

Boy, am I glad I have access to real, traditional genealogical sources so I can make myself busy with something else than analysing bogus FTDNA data.

PS. I dutifully reported this issue to FTDNA. With the unusual way their system works, I have no way of knowing if my report reached them.

PPS. Excuse me, that was two not one bogus segments. But you get the idea...

[T E Peterman]

I think the important thing is that we report such anomalies & I'm glad to see that you did that. It is probably easier for them to research reported situations than to mine through huge amounts of data trying to find these.

I have to wonder if, rather than running through QC over and over with little or no improvement, they decided to offer the data to all of us so we could tell them what is wrong.

I have had really good luck getting messages answered that I submit through the Contact Us form. All of us should keep it simple, specific & polite, including kit numbers that they can look at. Once they spot the problem & deploy a fix, most of our problems will probably be resolved.

Timothy Peterman

[T E Peterman]

At the end of another thread "Define Upcoming Monday", Matt reports that IT is already aware of the Chromosome Browser problem, knows the cause & is working on a fix.

Timothy Peterman