I’m Hooked on DNA Painter. You Should Be, Too.

I’ll just come right out and say it. DNA Painter is completely addicting. You will lose many, many hours (or more) of your life “painting” your DNA matches.

You won’t want to quit.

But here’s the good news: You don’t have to!

Why Bother With Chromosome Mapping?

DNA Painter was the Grand Prize winner in the DNA Innovation Contest at the 2018 Rootstech Conference. And it’s easy to see why. 

DNA Painter is a chromosome mapping tool that makes it really easy to visualize connections between your DNA relatives. 

As a teacher, I spent many hours in credential school and in-services learning about how people learn. And what I learned about myself is that I am primarily a visual learner (which explains why I’m completely unable to follow verbal driving directions).

If you’ve taken a DNA test and are wondering what to do next, you may want to give DNA Painter a try.

My First Attempt at Painting My Matches

I’m a terrible artist. But I’m not too shabby at painting my DNA. 

I started out by painting the DNA relatives whose relationships have already been confirmed through documentary evidence or personal knowledge.

Next, I added a few matches about which I felt reasonably confident and could sort of infer the relationship (i.e., 3rd cousins, 4th cousins, etc.). Most of these had family trees online, but a couple of them did not.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

And this is just the beginning. I have lots more matches to paint and mysteries to solve!

How I Did It

I’m not going to go into detail about how to paint your matches because several super-smart genetic genealogists have already done this, and I really hate reinventing the wheel.

So here are a few of the resources I used:

• The DNA Painter Help section
• The Shared cM Project 3.0 tool v4
• “Painting your DNA with inferred matches” by DNA Painter
• “DNA Painter – Chromosome Sudoku for Genetic Genealogy Addicts” by Roberta Estes
• “Science the Heck Out of Your DNA — Part 3” by TheDNAGeek
• “Playing with DNAPainter” by jmhartley
• “DNA Painter: The Tool that Helps You Find Links Between Your DNA Matches” by Melody Lassalle

You’ll also want to watch this video tutorial by Blaine Bettinger. It will take about 40 minutes of your time, but it’s absolutely worth it.

Wrap Up 

I’ve really just scratched the surface of chromosome mapping with DNA Painter, but I can already tell that it’s going to be my go-to DNA utility.

In fact, I may have made a major breakthrough on a research question that I’ve been working on for about 30 years. I can’t tell you what it is yet because I still have a lot more research to do, but I’m happy to possibly confirm that my working hypothesis might actually be correct!

If you like DNA Painter, you might want to consider subscribing to access additional tools.

Have you tried chromosome mapping with DNA Painter? What did you learn?

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