Welcome to 2025! – Opportunities and New Genetic Genealogy Articles

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It’s a new year with new opportunities. Lots of ancestors to find and others to confirm.

For me, the best part is actually learning about my ancestors’ lives. If you’re a subscriber, I’m sure you’ve already noticed that.

These adventures and misadventures are what inspire my blog articles. What works well, what doesn’t and how to use multiple tools to unveil more about our ancestors.

That’s what motivates me. I hope it motivates you, too.

New Articles in the Works

I’d like to share some of the articles and educational events I have planned for 2025, then ask what topics you’d like to see.

Articles on the drawing board include:

  • MyHeritage DNA File Download Instructions Update
  • Mitotree – when released
  • Mitochondrial Discover – when released
  • Genealogy Proof Series – The series continues with autosomal, Y-DNA, and mitochondrial DNA proof.
  • The Forest of the Trees – Lots of different kinds of trees for both Y and mitochondrial DNA at FamilyTreeDNA. How to use them, for what, and when. This will probably be written as a series.
  • New features and developments from vendors as they occur
  • Acadian Ancestors – I hope to complete my Acadian 52 Ancestors articles. For those who don’t know, “52 Ancestors” is a challenge to write about one ancestor each week for a year. You can sign up with Amy Johnson Crow here to learn more and receive weekly prompts. It’s fun and allows you to focus on one ancestor at a time, and the history that occurred in their lifetime.

Other Learning Opportunities

In addition to those articles, I’ll be at RootsTech in person presenting:

  • DNA Academy – the 2025 version, soup to nuts
  • DNA for Native American Genealogy
  • Reveal Your Maternal Ancestors and Their Stories Using Mitochondrial DNA
  • Guide to FamilyTreeDNA – Using Y-DNA, Mitochondrial DNA, Autosomal, X-DNA and Associated Tools

I’ll also participate in other educational events with Legacy Family Tree Webinars, WikiTree, the North Carolina Genealogy Society, and FamilyTreeDNA. I’ll provide more information about them later.

Finding Information

Remember, you can always use a keyword search on this blog to find any topic I’ve written about previously.

Also, Google’s AI has apparently trained itself using my blog articles, as have a couple of other AI tools. I know this because my blog comes up as a resource when I google questions. You can try that, too.

Your Turn – What Do You Want?

There are always new topics, new features, or different ways to explain things.

  • What would you like to see covered in 2025?
  • Are there any hot genetic genealogy topics that you’d love to learn more about?

Please make your suggestions in a comment on this article.

Here’s wishing you a wonderful 2025 with lots of ancestor discoveries.

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9 thoughts on “Welcome to 2025! – Opportunities and New Genetic Genealogy Articles”

  2. Ancestry ThruLines is a fantastic tool to compare direct ancestors between the tree of my DNA match and myself. I occasionally find that I recognize a familiar surname in a match’s tree that will lead me to a connection that is not directly to a common ancestor. I don’t even know how to express this, but I think that somehow if I could assemble a database of all the surnames in all the trees of my DNA matches, this might form the basis for an automated tool that is a super-ThruLines. Ancestry ProTools helps a bit. When I find several people among the shared matches who are closely related to the match I am examining, I can piece them together in my Quick & Dirty tree to find an ancestral couple which connects us a few generations earlier. The next challenge is to figure out how I relate to this ancestral couple. I know I am related to this couple because I have assembled some DNA matches who descend from them. Should I call this a sub-tree or a network? Sometimes I transfer a sub-tree to a WATO tree to easily see the relationships. Maybe there are NPEs that prevent me from making the connection to my known tree. I know there are connections to be found, but don’t know how to get more organized to research them.

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  3. I agree with Greg……Similar issues BUT w/o the ability to compare against a known tree as I’m searching for bio-grandparents & proving is difficult.

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  4. I’m similar to both Greg and BE above, but I’d like to know what do when you have a good cluster, right time period, but the colored dots (DNA matches) end up in three different categories/family lines (ie the missing mother’s line, both missing mother and the father’s line and just the father’s line). How do you reconcile this? In my case there’s only one piece of evidence that the MRCA couple in the cluster was in the same place as the father (I’m looking for Missing Mom) and the time period does match up sort of (land deed 10 years before the time of birth – a daughter would have had to have been left behind to be the mother) and it was a very brief stay.

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  5. Thank you, Roberta, for all the good information you have been putting out for all these years. I was lucky enough to find your blog soon after I did my first DNA testing and it has been a great help. I do have one question. I wonder if you might know how to answer. How can we directly contact MyHeritage? When I first signed up there, I wasn’t thinking and I put myself in as Melissa Middleswart. Now I would like to change it to my name at birth, Melissa Boatright, as I think that is how you were supposed to do your ancestral search things. But going to their website I can’t find any place to make direct contact. I think they had one of those chat things, but it was worthless, it gave answers to lots of frequently answered questions and that would’ve been fine if my question was one of them, but it was not. Thank you.

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