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Heads Up – Great Changes Coming at FamilyTreeDNA

Roberta Estes

This should be subtitled “Confessions of a Squeaky Wheel.”

Yes, I’ve been incessantly squeaky for a long time now, and it looks for all the world like this nagging, er, squeaking has worked.

Just a few minutes ago, this email arrived from FamilyTreeDNA, addressed to project administrators.

There’s at least one thing that’s time-sensitive, so be sure to read this today.

You may have been one of the FamilyTreeDNA customers who received one of two surveys a few weeks ago, after myDNA merged with FamilyTreeDNA. FamilyTreeDNA asked for feedback about what customers would like to see.

At that time, there was a raft of unfounded rumors that myDNA wasn’t committed to genealogy.

That was wrong, dead wrong. Couldn’t be further from the truth, and that’s not just extrapolated from this email. It’s a function of being that squeaky wheel. Based on this, FamilyTreeDNA obviously listened.

This is certainly welcome news!

That list of things we’ve been asking for…well, here you go.

Increased matches for many, along with improved matches. Did you see that?

There’s a lot here. It’s no wonder the matches page has been redesigned with all these new features.

It looks like the Y DNA page has been redesigned for the same reason. No mention of mitochondrial DNA though. Maybe that’s coming soon.

Thank goodness – a new Help Center.

And VIDEOs too!!!

Yes!!!

Ok, who loves that “Houston we have a problem” message? No one with their hand up? Me either.

However, I’ve already seen an improvement over the past few weeks, so maybe this has been an ongoing behind-the-scenes process.

And tooltips too!

For those who don’t know, a tooltip is a little information box with a couple of sentences that you can just mouse over. For example, a good place for a tooltip would be on the column headers explaining what that column means.

Ok, here’s the time-sensitive part.

I know FamilyTreeDNA said that they had closed the National Geographic Genographic transfer portal a year ago, but clearly they left it open as a courtesy.

However, with all these changes, it’s going away for good, now.

If you don’t transfer your Nat Geo Genographic kit before end of day on June 30th, you will not be able to do so. You can find instructions, here.

What’s Next?

We don’t know when these features will be released, exactly, but we do know it’s coming in July.

The fact that the Genographic transfer is gone as of June 30th suggests that at least some changes are imminent.

This cumulative list equates to a huge change, so I’d wager that it won’t be one big release, but a series of releases that build on each other.

I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait. I’ll be writing about the new features as soon as they arrive.

I’m signing in now to record the number of matches I have so I can compare when the new features arrive. You can too, by clicking here.

If you have kits from other vendors that you’ve been meaning to upload to FamilyTreeDNA, now would be a great time to do that. You can find step-by-step instructions for downloading raw data files from each vendor and uploading them elsewhere, here.

Feel free to share this article with groups or anyone else who might be interested!

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