Match DNA results to family tree information
This is a multi-part suggestion; the objective being to improve our ability to identify common ancestors among DNA matches:
Part 1. It would be nice to know if a living person is present, even without knowing any details about them. i.e., just a placeholder that says 'Living' and the ID would be useful. For example, suppose I create an entry for myself and at least one of my parents has died. If someone were viewing that parent, it would be nice to at least see that an entry/entries exists for living offspring of that parent, which will hopefully reduce the chance that a relative (or anyone) would create a duplicate entry for me. I would probably also create a spouse entry for the living parent linked to me, and again, viewers could see that at least a spouse/parent entry exists. As with other entries, the website should identify the account which created that person. Perhaps I find an existing entry for my uncle who recently passed away, so I'd like to contact the owner of that record to make the update. As for deceased children of living parents, it's probably best to list them as 'Deceased' but without any information -- no names or details until both of their parents are no longer living.
Part 2. Once living persons have visible placeholders, partner with GEDmatch so that GEDmatch can reference any person on familysearch.org (I'd advise allowing reverse direction lookups). With this capability, for any of my matches on GEDmatch, I could easily view their associated family tree to try and determine how we are related. For matches who are 'living', I could at least see who their great-grandmother (or whoever) was. At present, GEDmatch relies on uploads of GEDCOM files in order to perform this. What better than to link to the universal tree at familysearch instead? In the case of DNA matches, I'm less interested in the person I am matched with, but am extremely interested in their ancestors.
Comments
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Intriguing!
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