Categories
Opinion Tools

Genealogy and DNA: a review of 2025

A quick recap on what has been an eventful year for genealogists and those working with DNA, covering genealogy/testing company releases, artificial intelligence, and DNA Painter activities.

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New Features Tools

New in the matrix tool: enhanced charts, sorting, and more…

Read about the latest enhancements to the DNA matrix tool.

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Tips Tools

Recent improvements to the matrix tool

Since I launched the matrix tool, there have been many great suggestions for improvements, and I’ve just released an update that includes several of these.

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New Features Tools

Shared DNA at a glance: the new DNA matrix tool

I’m pleased to announce the new DNA matrix tool at DNA Painter, which lets you visualize and analyze how much DNA a group of testers share with each other.

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Tips Tools WATO

WATO vs WATO plus

What are the Odds? (WATO) can be very helpful for those investigating genealogical mysteries such as unknown parentage.

In 2024, I released an overhauled version of WATO: WATO plus. In this short post, I’ll explain the main differences between these versions.

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Guest posts Inferred Chromosome Mapping Tools

Mapping an untested grandparent’s DNA

Inferred chromosome mapping is a fun, puzzle-like technique that I discussed in this post from 2017. This often involves using a sibling or parent test to infer additional information from DNA matches. In 2020 I launched the inferred segments generator to make this process easier. In the following guest post, Josh Hutchings demonstrates how he has used the tool with grandparent segments.

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Tools

Shared cM Project Tool now available in additional languages

At the top right of the Shared cM Project Tool you’ll now see a dropdown menu allowing you to switch to another language. If you’d like to help translate the tool into a different language, please get in touch.

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Tools WATO

Introducing WATO plus, a new tool for investigating family mysteries

What are the odds plus (WATO+), a new and overhauled version of the popular WATO tool, was released last week. In this article I’ll focus on what’s new in WATO+…

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Tools WATO

Three ways to generate hypotheses in WATO+

I recently launched WATO+, the new version of What are the Odds? Suggest Hypotheses is a popular feature in the tool. The goal of this function is to try out every possible position in the tree for the unknown parent. However, this can be a mixed blessing as sometimes there are an overwhelming number of

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New Features Tools WATO

What are the Odds v3 sneak peek

Exciting times: the new version of What are the Odds? (WATO) will be released within the next month. This includes a raft of updates that I hope will make the tool more useful and easier to understand.

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