Do you ever wish there was a tool to help you prove a DNA relationship? I’m sure my readers have heard of and likely used DNA Painter, but have you heard of GedMatch’s Ancestor Projects? I first heard of this ‘tool’ when the administrator of the Crawford yDNA project tried to create a Crawford project. Unfortunately, we did not get enough participants to form a project.

While there isn’t a Crawford project, I have found several regional projects that may help me with my CRAWFORD brick wall.

As I’ve been researching my EVANS ancestry and trying to figure out whether the family structure for James Evans and Sally Garret is correct, I’ve wanted to use DNA to help prove the relationships. Unfortunately, I need access to a chromosome browser and most of my EVANS matches are on Ancestry.(See Evans DNA) That’s when I remembered these projects. With an EVANS project, I could ask my matches to upload their DNA to GedMatch and join the project. However, there isn’t an EVANS project at this time. There is a Garret project, but my membership is yet to be accepted.

While there isn’t a project to help me with my Evans/Garret research, there are other projects that may help me with some of my other lines. Since my third great grandmother is a Kennedy from New York, I opted to request membership in the Kennedy project. Like most projects, It also has a Facebook group where I can contact my Kennedy matches in the project.

When I used the segment analysis tool for my mother’s kit, I got a lot of results. However, most of those were for myself and my two brothers. In order to ‘delete’ me and my siblings from the list of matches, I used Ctrl-A to highlight everything, Ctrl-C to copy the results and then in Excel, I used Ctrl-V to paste those results. After deleting the header information and all of the lines for myself and my siblings, I was left with TWO matches.

Thus, I have identified two people on GedMatch that may share my Kennedy ancestry. And by knowing a chromosomal segment, I can now look at my other GedMatch matches to see who shares that same segment. To do this, I used the Segment Search ($Tier 1) tool on Gedmatch and limited it to chromosome 15.

That search created a list of matches that share segments on chromosome 15. I then looked for a starting and ending position that would include include the small segment shared with my KENNEDY match.

Thus, I have narrowed down my long list of matches on GedMatch to these 7 as possible Kennedy (and Wells) matches. Weirdly, my Kennedy match is not on this list. When I did a one to one comparison with the test from the Kennedy project, I got a message saying the test did not exist. Thus, I’m guessing that the owner of the match is only participating in the project and not with the entire GedMatch community.

Working with this project makes me wish that we could get enough participants for a CRAWFORD project!