DNA Color Coding

Refining My Use of Colored Dots for DNA Matches

Have you used Your DNA Guide’s color-coding system by Diahan Southard? It took me a few replays of the videos to really grasp the method, but once I did, it became one of my favorite tools for organizing my many DNA matches on Ancestry.

Lately, I’ve been applying this technique to identify matches who descend from the SELLERS family. In doing so, I also discovered a cluster of CRAWFORD matches—descendants of a man who appears to be a brother of my fifth great-grandfather.

As I color-coded the shared matches, I realized it would be helpful to create an additional color for ThruLines matches. That led to the creation of my new color label: “7 Crawford Douglas Sellers.” The label’s name follows my personal convention—beginning with the generation number and followed by the surnames of the ancestral couple. In this case, I added SELLERS so I could instantly recognize that this group includes ThruLines descendants of the Crawford daughters who married into the Sellers family.

Adding Generational Layers

As I continue my color-coding efforts, I’m expanding my system to include generational groupings:

• ThruLines matches receive both a couple color and a generational color.
• Shared matches of those ThruLines individuals receive only the couple color.

This approach lets me scroll through my matches and quickly see which ones are identified by ThruLines—and which ones still need to be placed in my tree.

In the image below, all the matches display a green “C” dot, representing Crawford Smith (Nelson G. Crawford) descendants. Matches that also have a “3” or “4” dot are ThruLines matches, while those without numbered dots have not yet been connected through ThruLines.

As I keep refining my color-coding system, I’m reminded how flexible Diahan Southard’s method really is. The more I adapt it to my research, the more clearly I can see the family connections hidden in my DNA matches.