New Toys Lead to Big Discovery, or Trouble
The last week of February has become an exciting time for genealogists each year, coinciding with the big RootsTech annual conference in Salt Lake City. It seems to have become customary for the big players in the business to roll out new products and features to maximize the splash with their target audience.
This year it was two of the DNA companies that made big announcements, which might loosely be termed as "advances in big data analysis". Ancestry.com unveiled two new advances in their DNA matching service that clearly are taking the next steps in trying to connect dots between DNA evidence and records searching. While their new ThruLines feature is far from highly accurate in its connection suggestions, it generated some new clues for me that led to some exciting new discoveries. ThruLines were generated for most of my ancestors back to my 5-x great grandparents - literally nearly 60 sets of new specific clues to examine. The numbers were much smaller for MyHeritage's new "Theory of Family Relativity" tool, but the accuracy of the clues they generated for me was much higher.
And the tools for sifting through records are improving rapidly too, particularly at the free LDS site familysearch.org. Ancestry introduced searchable tagging to their tree services which greatly improves the ability to quickly categorize your work. The digitization of records from around much of the world continues at a brisk pace too, and it is heartening to see how much is already searchable online while knowing "there will never be less historical records online than there are right now!".
What is clear is that the next generation of technology is developing to allow us to get more value out of our existing DNA tests by connecting dots for us in an instant that just a few weeks ago would have been a painstakingly slow process. By further coupling these technologies to existing family trees, the odds improve of knowing how we connect to previously mysterious matches. Even though these clues are sometimes completely wrong, these advancements are a welcome development in further evaluating shared matches. Given that there are millions of DNA testers in every company's database, the odds of finding out new connections in your family history just went up.
This year it was two of the DNA companies that made big announcements, which might loosely be termed as "advances in big data analysis". Ancestry.com unveiled two new advances in their DNA matching service that clearly are taking the next steps in trying to connect dots between DNA evidence and records searching. While their new ThruLines feature is far from highly accurate in its connection suggestions, it generated some new clues for me that led to some exciting new discoveries. ThruLines were generated for most of my ancestors back to my 5-x great grandparents - literally nearly 60 sets of new specific clues to examine. The numbers were much smaller for MyHeritage's new "Theory of Family Relativity" tool, but the accuracy of the clues they generated for me was much higher.
And the tools for sifting through records are improving rapidly too, particularly at the free LDS site familysearch.org. Ancestry introduced searchable tagging to their tree services which greatly improves the ability to quickly categorize your work. The digitization of records from around much of the world continues at a brisk pace too, and it is heartening to see how much is already searchable online while knowing "there will never be less historical records online than there are right now!".
What is clear is that the next generation of technology is developing to allow us to get more value out of our existing DNA tests by connecting dots for us in an instant that just a few weeks ago would have been a painstakingly slow process. By further coupling these technologies to existing family trees, the odds improve of knowing how we connect to previously mysterious matches. Even though these clues are sometimes completely wrong, these advancements are a welcome development in further evaluating shared matches. Given that there are millions of DNA testers in every company's database, the odds of finding out new connections in your family history just went up.
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