DNA Painter is an award-winning website that can help demystify your DNA results

Top FAQs Register for a free account

Free Webinars

What you can do at DNA Painter

Visualize your direct line

Create an elegant, searchable page for your direct ancestors and enhance it with custom visualisations such as religion, country of birth and age of death

More info FAQ Create an ancestral tree

Map segments of DNA to ancestors

Chromosome mapping is a fascinating puzzle that helps you to decode your inheritance by tracking known matches and comparing them to others

More info Example map Create new map

Figure out how you’re related to a DNA match

Enter the number of cMs of DNA you share with a match and the shared cM tool will help you consider possible relationships

More info Visit the Shared cM tool

Use matches to identify an unknown ancestor

If you have a group of matches you can fit into a family tree, "What are the Odds?" (WATO) can help you figure out how you might be related to them

WATO FAQ Visit WATO

DNA Painter at RootsTech 2023

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“DNA Painter is an easy-to-use tool that helps genealogists make sense of DNA testing. By mapping segments of DNA to chromosomes, we can begin to see which ancestors gave us which pieces of DNA, and thus how new matches are related. As a result, DNA Painter has quickly become an essential tool for genealogists!”: Blaine Bettinger

“Thank you, thank you, thank you for creating this tool! It's my new obsession and I am enjoying it immensely. What I absolutely love is I don't have to understand science to use it.”: Devonna Wick
“This is the most user friendly, easy to use mapping tool.”: David Cooper Holmes
“So glad to have discovered this tool. A warning though: it is highly addictive!”: Jenny Terras

More help and advice

DNA can be confusing, but there are lots of great resources available to help. To get the most out of this site, it might help to watch a webinar above and/or read the where to start section first. This will give you a sense of which of the site's features will be most likely to help you achieve your goals.

Blaine Bettinger of DNA Central and thegeneticgenealogist.com has also produced a helpful video introduction to chromosome mapping.

For more specific advice on genetic genealogy and how to draw conclusions from your chromosome mapping, I highly recommend the blogs and resources linked in the 'Further Reading' sections of the glossary, along with the Genetic Genealogy Tips and Techniques Facebook group.

Other Resources:

The help section includes an FAQ and a page of articles and resources.
There's a dedicated DNA Painter user group on Facebook.
I have an example chromosome map that you can play with. Nothing on this page will be saved, so feel free to try moving things around and deleting them!
Follow @dnapainter on Twitter or like the Facebook page for updates on new features.

Look at an example