A Puerto Rican Look at: DNA Painter

Also, take a look at Blaine Bettinger’s DNA Painter Video about how to use the tool as well.

How does it work? 

After creating an account you have to create a profile for yourself (or whomever you will be chromosome mapping for) and that is where you can keep track of your matching segments and cousins. You can create various profiles if you’d like and it has actually been interesting creating ones for my brothers and seeing where they match with certain people and the genes they inherited that I might not have.

You may use your genetic matches from various companies such as 23andme, Gedmatch (transferred results), and/or FamilyTreeDNA to name a few. Unfortunately, if you have AncestryDNA you can not use your segment data unless you have transferred them into Gedmatch and you’d have to hope (or convince that person) to transfer their results as well to see on which chromosome you match. This is important because this is how you begin to establish connections with those cousins and which ancestor(s) in your tree they match. Without the knowledge of the segment, you’d be lost as to where they match you and others.

Seeing as I have mainly used my 23andme information, this is what I’ll mostly be referring to when it comes creating matches on DNA Painter.

If you take a look at how my grandfather and I match you can see that of course there are fairly large chunks. All of these segments below I got from him, so when I map these segments on my DNA Painter profile I can attribute them to him using his name or the name of his parents, my great-grandparents. Remember, these genes can be from any of his parents, so you’d have to use both of their names when you set the segments.

Me vs. My Maternal Grandfather [Personal 23andMe]

Under your DNA Painter, every time you want to set new segments or matches you have to click on “Paint a New Match”. There, you can use the start position and end position of each chromosome you match on and upload that into the box (look below).

“Painting a New Match” [Personal Screenshot]

The box will look something like this! Depending on how many times you match that person across various segments you can continue to pile on the segments on new lines in the same box. Once you have placed the segments and are ready to save the match, you can decide what color to save the match and what name they can go under. For example, I chose to use my grandfather’s name and so anytime I match someone through him they go under the color yellow and attached to his name. For me, this allows me to see the matches that I have through him.

A Look at Comparisons

By using various of my own cousins, confirmed paper trail matches, and even unknown matches I have begun to map my chromosomes, currently they look like this!

My DNA Painting

As you can see there are various colors across my chromosomes and some gray areas. Overall, I have been able to map ~91% of my DNA through 489 segments of mapping. Some of the larger chunks such as yellow (maternal grandfather) and red/blue (paternal matches) are attached to just my great-grandparents while smaller chunks to older ancestors. It’s definitely a work in progress and not so straight forward in the sense that you won’t always have a match to help identify a grey zone or to go back further a generation. It also depends on how much the match knows about their family and how willing they are to talk about shared your genealogy.  

As I had mentioned each color is set to different ancestors in my family tree. A cool feature on DNA Painter is that you can limit it to your maternal or paternal side depending on who you are looking at or focusing on at the moment. 

Once you start matching up cousins they sort of begin to stack over one another. Taking a look at just my maternal side of chromosome 1, I’ll break down what the colors means and the stacking: 

The chromosome starts off with two shades of green but quickly jumps to a long yellow segment. Then again to a dark green segment. As you know the yellow segment represents my maternal grandfather, while the dark green represents my maternal grandmother. Weirdly enough you can see how my maternal grandfather’s DNA just cut in between and left a small segment in the beginning from my grandmother. The light green segments belong to my great grand-grandfather who I was lucky to test before he passed. This means that from the long dark green piece (grandmother), the light green piece (great grandfather) marks what I inherited straight from him. You can deduce than that the other sections from the long dark green piece are from my great grandmother (red boxes added by me). Marked below: 

Within the red boxes I added you can see there are purple segments, the segments are from matches that match my 2nd great-grandparents Pedro Dávila and Francisca Orozco, parents of my great-grandmother. Any match that falls in between the dark green lines match my maternal grandmother and then from there I can deduce if they match me through my great grandfather or great grandmother. 

On the flip side, there are the yellow segments. As you can see I only have yellow there, which means that I don’t have other family members to help narrow where along my grandfather’s family these matches are from. However, it’s interesting to see who matches me there. 2 years ago I wrote about genetic Ashkenazi Jewish matches that had segments with me on chromosome 1 and they all overlapped one another. Read here! As you can see below, these matches are from my maternal grandfather and they are all stacked one on top of the other meaning that they along with my maternal grandfather somehow share an ancestor. The segments are fairly small so I would imagine this match is rather far back. 

As I mentioned early having siblings allows you to see where you matches might differ. A quick example below is the maternal side of Chromosome 8. My entire chromosome comes from my maternal grandmother where as my older brother inherits most of it my maternal grandfather. Lastly, my little brother gets good sizable chunk from both of our grandparents! 

Here you can see on my X-chromosome I’ve inherited some native Indigenous ancestry but also some European from my grandmother and her X-chromosome ancestors. These segments came from 23andMe and I overlapped them onto my grandmother’s side seeing as how they all fall under the dark green line. 

There’s definitely a lot to play with and learn from on DNA Painter. For me, it’s helped provide some clarity to matches especially when it seems that everyone matches everyone in my family. Knowing which lines they match through DNA Painter allow me to say “okay, now I can specify this conversation to my ancestors from this region/town/surnames“. However, don’t be fooled! Some matches share segments with both of my parents and therefore I save them twice, once under my maternal matches and again under my paternal matches when mapping my chromosomes. This way I don’t associate incorrectly that segment to another ancestor. So you definitely have to be alert to how you match and use various cousins or profiles if you have them to confirm that match. I’m far from being an expert with DNA Painter but knowing the few things I know it has allowed me to become a bit more confident with genetic genealogy and using it to the best of my ability!