Getting Started with Genome Mate Pro, Part 8 — The Relative Detail Tab

Scroll down for links to other posts in this series.

What good are segments by themselves? Not much. To advance our genealogy, we need to be able to associate DNA segments with pedigree information. In GMP, you can store those facts (or even speculation) in the RELATIVE DETAIL tab, and that information will be fully searchable.

There is a lot to this tab, so we’ll take it one step at a time. This lesson is more of an introductory tour than a practical exercise, so sit back and relax for a bit.

The CHROMOSOMES Tab Is Linked to the RELATIVE DETAIL Tab

Open GMP, go to the CHROMOSOMES tab, and click on someone in your chromosome browser. It doesn’t matter who, but pick a close-ish relative if you have one tested. I chose my 1C1R, Bryan. The selected row will be highlighted in peach.
Double click on that person’s name. GMP will whisk you to the RELATIVE DETAIL tab, with a page already open for that person. Their name will appear in red text above the large field called Research Notes.
For fun, switch back to the CHROMOSOMES tab. The segment(s) for the person you picked should now be highlighted in pink. That’s a quick, convenient way to find the match in the chromosome browser when you’re switching back and forth between tabs.
Click the person’s name again to switch back to the RELATIVE DETAIL tab.

Explore the RELATIVE DETAIL Tab

At the top left of the RELATIVE DETAIL tab, notice that there are subtabs. I wasn’t kidding when I said there was a lot here!
Let’s walk through the five subtabs.
Click the ABOUT subtab. You will see eight panels, each for a different type of information. Some will already contain information from the GEDmatch import we did earlier.
• The “Relative” panel at top left has fields for the match name, a contact name (e.g., if the kit is administered by someone else), a phone number, the match’s sex, and yDNA and mtDNA haplogroups. For Cousin Bryan, the GEDmatch one-to-many import included some of these details, and GMP automatically put the information where it belonged.
• “Heritage” will be populated by AncestryDNA ethnicity information in a later part of the tutorial series. You can also manually enter information here.
• “Ancestry Overview” offers a brief overview of the match: estimated relationship, number of segments, and total centomorgans shared. We will learn how to replace the estimated relationship with a known one when we cover the RELATIVE LIST tab.
• “MRCA Note” is editable. It will also populate with the information in the “Notes” field of an AncestryDNA import.
• Below the “MRCA Note” panel is a set of fields with buttons beside them. Most will self-populate once we’ve done the relevant imports. Clicking on the SEND EMAIL button will generate a form letter to that match, while the other buttons will open specific web pages in your internet browser.
• “Research Notes” is all you! Enter anything you want here: your own thoughts or speculation about the relationship, copies of email exchanges, a to-do list for your research plan, you name it. And it’ll all be searchable!
• At the far right are two panels, one above the other, that persist through all of the . The uppermost one will probably say “Hide Relative List”
• At the bottom right is a small panel listing the “key” information for the selected match. For Cousin Bryan, it has his GEDmatch kit number and his name. “GM” in the Source column is short-hand for GEDmatch.
The AHNENTAFEL subtab will not contain any information at this stage. Note the column headers for number, name, surname, birth year and place, and death year and place. Later, we will learn how to import family tree data for individual matches.
Click the FAMILY COMPARISON subtab.
The panels called “Family Locations”, “Surnames”, and “Relative’s Ancestor List” will all self-populate with data from imports that we’ll do later. GMP is able to find “Surnames in Common” between your gedcom and the surnames list for your match. Clicking on one of those surnames will pull up “Possible Connections” (possible shared ancestors), and clicking on one of those will, in turn, pull up details about that ancestor from your gedcom.
Click the DNA COMPARISON subtab.

On the left will be a list of all of the segments that the selected match shares with each of your profiles. In the screenshot above, Cousin Bryan shares multiple segments with both me and my mom. Note that GMP uses the short names here (Mom and Geeky) rather than our full names, to save space. The column headers are sortable. The middle panel lets you assign individual segments to a side (maternal/paternal), a group that you designate, or even to specific ancestors in your gedcom. We’ll get back to this utility later.
The MERGE subtab allows you to merge duplicate matches into a single entry. For example, if Cousin Bryan had two kits at GEDmatch (he does), I could merge them into one, so he wouldn’t have duplicate segments in the CHROMOSOMES tab. Better yet, if he’s tested at more than one site (he has), I can merge his data from each of them into a single entry that contains details from GEDmatch, FTDNA, 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and MyHeritage. Merging matches across testing sites gives GMP a lot of power. We’ll learn how to do it in an upcoming lesson.

Notice how many times in this tutorial session I said we’d get back to something later? There’s a ton of information in the RELATIVE DETAIL tab, and it’s all nicely integrated into other features of GMP. That said, we won’t see the full benefit of this tab until we’ve set up our databases a bit more.