Asking WATO to suggest hypotheses

Learn what happens when you ask WATO to suggest hypotheses

Suggest hypotheses is a button within WATO plus that will become active once you have one or more more matches of over 40cM in the tree. It doesn't appear if you have smaller matches because there are simply too many possible relationships for smaller matches for any predictions to be useful.

• After you click the button, WATO will attempt to consider every position in the tree as the parent of the unknown child.
• It will use birth and death dates as well as the sex of the parent.

Depending on your matches and how big your tree is, this process can take a while and may result in an (annoyingly!) large number of possible hypotheses. This will include full and half-siblings to anyone who has descendants who are matches.

If you have a good tree that already contains lots of candidates, you might consider checking the box 'Stop WATO from adding unknown people to my tree.' You can find this checkbox in the menu that sits behind the Actions and Settings button.

For more information

• FAQ: How does suggesting hypotheses work?
• Blog post: Three ways to generate hypotheses in WATO plus