Jim Bartlett is a genetic genealogist who loves to work with spreadsheets. I too like spreadsheets, but he is way beyond me. I follow his blog and always wonder if I should try my hand at building the “master sheet”!
Meanwhile, “clustering” is all the rage now. There are automated methods to build clusters and kindship charts for FTDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe and Gedmatch. But Ancestry.com has decided to not provide a cluster option and as even blocked others from doing so.
The other day, Jim Bartlett posted a method to manually create a clustering spreadsheet for Ancestry! Manually!? I read the post and decided he was a bit crazy. It would take forever to type all those DNA matches I have in Ancestry! Then I remembered that he has a “master sheet” somewhere, and it is probably easy for him to add the cluster-logic.
You can read his article here. This is a must read if you plan to try this. You don’t have to read all of it.
https://segmentology.org/2022/02/26/manual-clustering-to-find-ancestors/
So, I consulted Google and went searching for a method to download all my DNA matches from Ancestry. Google didn’t fail me, I found a spreadsheet that you can copy screens of matches into. It is a special spreadsheet that is loaded with code to scrape data from the DNA match list screens that only works in the Google Docs arena. It helps to have prepared your Ancestry matches ahead of time. It still requires a few hours of work to identify clusters. But it works! I now have 179 matches split into 10 different clusters. Each match has hot links into Ancestry to review trees and add notes.
Using this special spreadsheet is a bit complicated and I am not going to even try to tell you how. The following links do a good job explaining it, good enough for me to make it work. The YouTube is a real how-to video.
I read this but did not use the links here.
https://www.familyhistoryfanatics.com/download-ancestrydna-matches-hack
This is the YouTube with the instructions that I used. The link to download the spreadsheet can be found in the comment section after the video, click “show more” to see it. But do watch the video first. Click Watch on YouTube below.
Hint: download the sheet, but don’t open it. Just upload it to your Google Docs area and use it there.
Monterey County Genealogy Society 