One of the big things in the genetic genealogy world these days is “clustering”. Basically this is a way to group matches you have into family groups to make it easier to figure out how the unknown match relates to you. Two of the popular ways are DNA Gedcom and Genetic Affairs. The beginning of this fad and still the easiest and cheapest way to cluster is to do it yourself using the Leed’s Method. A really good explanation is given by Dana Leed herself at her blog.
But, all of these methods presuppose that you have a spreadsheet! Not everyone has a spreadsheet: perhaps you just got a new computer for Christmas; perhaps you don’t like the rental paradigm that Microsoft is using. The point of this post is to remind everyone about the FREE spreadsheet programs provided by LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. In both cases, you can download and install either just a spreadsheet program or a suite that includes a spreadsheet, word processor, power-point equivalent and database. They really are free, never any strings attached. You just have to install one or the other. They come in 3 flavors: Windows, Mac, Linux.
The Monterey Family History Center has the LibreOffice Suite installed on all computers if you want to see it in action before you get it yourself. We had OpenOffice on the older computers, but LibreOffice came preinstalled (by the SaltLake FHC) on our new machines.
Don’t let the lack of a spreadsheet keep you from building a Leeds Cluster! Get thee over to Dana Leed’s blog and follow her along. Then you can come to one of the DNA Interest Group meetings and tell us how it worked! Or you could do a show-n-tell at one of the MoCoGenSo monthly meetings!
“Just because you have grown up with the Internet does not mean that the Internet is grown up.
Monterey County Genealogy Society 