by Ditsa Keren

Discover Your DNA Matches with Double Match Triangulator

Discover Your DNA Matches with Double Match Triangulator

Double Match Triangulator is an Autosomal DNA analysis tool for Windows. It combines segment match data of two or more people and automates the analysis of your segment match data, combining it with common ancestor data that you provide. In this interview, founder Louis Kessler discusses the technology and approach that make Double Match Triangulator so unique and points out some interesting trends to follow in the next couple of years.

Please describe the story behind Double Match Triangulator: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?

I’ve been a genealogist for most of my life. I have a degree in statistics, computer science, and programming. I’m currently retired after forty years of working for the electric company in my province, so now I spend most of my time doing genealogy. 

In February 2016, I went on an Unlock the Past genealogy cruise around New Zealand and Australia with about 100 other genealogists. There were many speakers there, including myself, and one of them was Judy Russell, a leading genealogist. She was talking about DNA.  

I had heard a little bit about DNA for genealogy but I was a little skeptical and somewhat scared of what I would find. Judy gave a very interesting talk, so I went to talk to her, and when I mentioned my 93-year-old uncle, she stopped me right there and said that as soon as I get back home, I must get his DNA tested. I did it, and that started a whole chain of events. That’s how I got into DNA.

I was wondering what would happen. Would there be any relatives I recognize in the matches? I was surprised because back then, there weren’t a lot of testers yet. The results came back and there were 7000 matches, when most people were getting 300 matches. I was wondering what was going on there and looking at the results, I saw my uncle and I saw a third cousin, but no one else. I didn’t know what that meant so I started reading and following things on the internet. The reason why I have 7000 matches is because of endogamy, and I was wondering how I could use those matches and do something with them.

What ended up happening was that I read about segment triangulation. If you triangulate three segments, so that person A is matching Person B and Person A is matching person C and Person B is matching person C, then there’s a chance that you may have found three people who might have a common ancestor. 

Here’s a quick presentation to illustrate the concept behind Double Match Triangulator:

I thought that was fascinating, but I didn’t know how to do that for 7000 matches. I played around a little bit and I got myself DNA tested. I downloaded my uncle and my match lists from FamilyTreeDNA and started comparing them. I realized that if you have two people’s match lists, you can determine every single triangulation that those two people have. 

I was doing all this in a spreadsheet and it was horrendous, and since I’m a programmer, I decided to put together a little program that does what I did in the spreadsheet to figure out all the triangulations for you.

Just about that time, in the fall of 2016, RootsTech was coming up, and I decided to enter my little program into their Innovator Showdown because I thought it was innovative and I hadn’t seen it done before. So I gave it a name, Double Match Triangulator, and I entered it. 

There were several dozen entries and to my surprise, I was selected as one of the top 10. They invited me to Salt Lake City to compete at Rootstech in the Showdown. To make a long story short, I made a presentation in front of 6000 people that was live-streamed to another fifteen thousand people, and I was awarded third place. Shortly after that, I built a website for my program and started selling it. There was a fair bit of interest in it, so I continued to develop it.

My last update was in February this year, and I’m now working on version 4, which will include new improvements based on a study that I’m doing with a cousin in New Mexico on our side of the family. That’s basically where I am right now.

What kind of insights can I get if I run my DNA data through Double Match Triangulator?

A lot of people use DNA Painter, a program that paints matches onto a map of your chromosomes so that you can figure out which parts of your DNA came from which ancestors. 

If you’re trying to figure out how you’re related to someone, and they have a segment on that same portion that comes from your great-great-grandmother’s side, then that person would also have to come from that side. That isolates where you can do your genealogical research to find that person in your family tree. Helping to find family connections is the primary benefit of DNA for genealogy. 

Doing it on DNA Painter, you have to go through each segment manually, one by one, by yourself, but Double Match Triangulator will do all of it automatically for you and create a file that you can upload to DNA Painter and see all of your ancestors in the segments that they belong to based on your matches. 

You have to tell it for each of your matches, who your known most recent common ancestor is. So if you have a third cousin, you’ll say this is a third cousin on my father’s mother’s father’s side, and add that into your people file, and Double Match Triangulator will use that to put those ancestral mappings into the file.

After that, if you want any more technical details, it’ll also give you every single triangulation you have with every person. 

It also uses a technique called inferred matching. When you have a relative such as a sibling or a parent who matches someone that you don’t, you can then tell who you don’t match with and might be able to infer who you do along the same lines. There are advanced techniques that you can use this way, which are very difficult and time-consuming to do manually. Double Match Triangulator does them for you.

How easy is it for a layperson to use this program?

It isn’t too difficult to use, there’s only a single screen, and it has a fairly extensive help file. The biggest problem with a layperson is you have to have a decent knowledge of DNA and how it works in matching. You should know what triangulations mean and what they don’t mean to properly interpret the program’s results. 

If you don’t have that basic DNA knowledge, then you’ll just throw the information in and you won’t understand it and won’t be able to use it effectively. 

I have a blog related to the program and to aspects of using it, as well as DNA and interpreting what segment matches and triangulations are.

How is your platform different from services like 23andMe, MyHeritage, Ancestry, and Family Tree DNA?

All of the main DNA testing companies, Ancestry and 23andMe, FamilyTree DNA, MyHeritage, are doing different innovative things. 

Ancestry has its ThruLines, where it’s trying to connect your DNA to the family trees and figure out new connections for you. 

MyHeritage has its Theory of Family Relativity that’s doing the same thing. 

23andMe has a very interesting auto-generated family tree that it generates from your DNA matches, which is quite a difficult thing to do without using any family tree information at all. They’re making headway that way. 

With Family Tree DNA, you generate a family tree and it automatically figures out which of your matches are on your father’s side, which ones are on your mother’s side, and which might be on both sides. 

Each of these companies is innovative in its own unique way, but then there are the third parties who are doing even more by providing tools to help you analyze matches and further your genealogy research.

Some use clustering algorithms that take your shared matches and try to find groups of people with whom you have something in common. Those people might all belong to a certain side of your family, and that’s one type of program that is out there. 

DNA painting is another type of third-party program that lets you paint your matches and helps genealogists figure out how people are connected. 

Double Match Triangulator is a hybrid of those two. I haven’t seen anything else that analyzes and gives you all your triangulations. GEDmatch has a tier-one tool that will give you some of your triangulations, but nobody else has used my concept of combining multiple match files to produce all of the triangulations. It gives you a unique perspective of your DNA matches and a different way of looking at them and analyzing them.

What are you working on these days, and what are your plans for the future?

I continue to update my program as needed. I thought it had reached a point in February where it was almost doing everything it could do until I actually started using it a bit more in the last few months. Now I see some other major improvements that can make it even more user-friendly for the people who just want to plug and play and only want to have their own match data painted. 

I’ve done some whole-genome analysis of myself, and that intrigued me as well. I don’t see a genealogical use for that yet but the current method that standard DNA testing companies use is quite adequate for finding genealogical matches. 

I’m intrigued by this technology, especially PacBio, who has come up with accurate long reads in the last year, to the point where they’re almost able to assemble a whole genome without using a reference. That will make it much more accurate and possibly give us the chance to phase the chromosomes to the parents, which hasn’t been possible with whole-genome analysis before. That technology is also of much interest to me and I wrote a few blog posts about it.

I also have another general genealogy program called Behold that I’ve developed. I haven’t updated it in the last few years because since I retired a few years ago, DNA has taken over my life. Whatever free time I used to have, it is now taken up by DNA analysis, but I do plan to get back to it. In the last 18 months, I started working on my genealogy software again, applying DNA aspects to it, and displaying information to help you better utilize your family tree data.

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About Author
Ditsa Keren
Ditsa Keren

Ditsa Keren is a technology blogger and entrepreneur with a strong passion for biology, ecology and the environment. In recent years, Ditsa has been specializing in technical and scientific writing, covering topics like biotechnology, algae cultivation, nutrition, and women's health.

Ditsa Keren is a technology blogger and entrepreneur with a strong passion for biology, ecology and the environment. In recent years, Ditsa has been specializing in technical and scientific writing, covering topics like biotechnology, algae cultivation, nutrition, and women's health.