DNA Painter has a blog! The founder & chief programmer writes the posts.
https://blog.dnapainter.com/blog/
If you are interested in DNA Painter, visit this place once in a while. You could even add it to your Feedly.
DNA Painter is a great website that has lots of tools, most are usable with a free account. We have discussed parts of it here before and have had demos of it in the DNA SIG.
The website The DNA Geek just brought it to our attention that the DNA Painter tool called WATO (What Are The Odds) has a version 2 in beta test that can take an imported Gedcom file! Wow, this will make building the WATO Tree much easier. And birth & death dates will automatically be pulled in.
You can read the DNA Geek article: CLICK HERE.
Or, of course, just go to DNA Painter itself, go to the TOOLS page and look for the WATO Beta V2 link. 
“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” – John Lennon
23andMe builds a nice tree using DNA matches which can be augmented yourself with people who have not tested. The tree is usually small, and, except for your additions and the recently deceased, only has living people. The tree is fun, since it is DNA driven! There are issues with it which we have discussed in our DNA SIG meetings, but most people like it.
Kitty Cooper writes a great blog about “genealogy, genetics and gardening”. Kitty Cooper is an American bridge player and genetic genealogist from New York City. I enjoy her posts and her blog has a permanent place in my Feedly sites. See her blog CLICK HERE .
She just wrote another posting about the 23andMe tree! Most of the post is interesting personal views, but the thing that caught my eye was the part about recalculating the tree. 23andMe doesn’t include a simple push-button method of refreshing the tree, Kitty shows how to do it!
See the whole posting here: CLICK HERE.
Be sure to save a picture of the tree with your additions before you try this! 😊
“It’ll all work out in the end; if it isn’t worked out, it ain’t the end.” – Betsy Johnson
My last DNA test at FTDNA was the Big-Y test in 2018. At that time, the Big-Y was the Big-Y500. Now they have the Big-Y700. The 500 vs 700 has to do with how many STR markers are included. This Y-DNA test is the most expensive genetic test you can get except for a full genome test. I figured I was done doing Y-DNA tests after my Big-Y500. The test pulled me out to haplogroup I-A13294 !
I sent my BAM file to YFULL, got positioned in their tree and have been simply waiting for more paternal line cousins to take a test to make my Private Variants useful, that is, to form another extension in my tree.
Along comes Roberta Estes again. She wrote another post BIG Y ANALYSIS last week, this time about Big-Y DNA analysis.
She makes it sound really useful for me to upgrade my Big-Y500 to the Big-Y700. I’m worried that I might be a sucker, aka addicted, to DNA tests. I really need someone to help me decide. Here we go again, waiting for sales, perhaps on Father’s Day or the 4th of July. Perhaps someone can come to the next DNA Discussion video conference and give us all a bit of guidance!
Charlie… read the above post and then tell me what to do! 😊
“DNA has shown that the ancestors you think you have aren’t necessarily the ancestors you actually have.” – young wives tale
I finally opened my Genetic Affairs account last week, ran a few Pedigree charts and reported here about it! And then, Ancestry.com told Genetic Affairs to STOP. My timing is terrible. Seriously, see these excerpts from the email they sent to me.
As some of you may have already heard, last Friday I (Evert-Jan Blom, founder of Genetic Affairs) obtained a cease and desist letter from ZwillGen, the legal representatives from Ancestry. In short, Ancestry wants me to stop offering the AutoCluster analyses that employ Ancestry data.
I was able to get one Auto Cluster run at Ancestry completed before the plug was pulled! I also ran two at FTDNA, but preferred the results from Ancestry.
Presumably Ancestry is unhappy with the things Genetic Affairs provides. Or they are developing something similar themselves.
So, what will happen tomorrow? Or next week. Tune in for more news. If you know more answers, please let us all know.
Life isn’t all about genealogy. Here is a bit of a diversion that is real life and not scary!
Showing surface winds for the Earth at earth.nullschool.net
The link below is a highly visual and zoomable dynamic wind map from Cameron Beccario at nullschool.net.
Click here to see the default Earth map.
Click anywhere in the page, use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out, and click’n’drag to move the display around, similar to Google Earth. It will show full global data. By default it will be showing surface wind speeds and directions for northern Europe and the eastern Atlantic. The data is updated every three hours. Click the ‘earth’ text in lower left corner for more options.
Click here for credits and more information.
(We are not displaying the page in-line because the iframe code is not allowed in WordPress.com sites for safety/security reasons.)
Click here to see the Natural Earth Data site.
