ZDNETIn 2017, I sent DNA samples to Ancestry, as well as to two other DNA companies. My parents had recently passed away, and I had some questions about my family background that I hoped the DNA might reveal.As it turned out, that DNA reveal sparked a fairly long and painful story, which you can read here: Ever since then, I’ve kind of dabbled with my family tree. I enjoy digging through documents and connections, following clues, and updating charts.But then, a few weeks ago, I was contacted by one of my DNA matches. It was an odd sort of connection.Based on the DNA data, I knew exactly how related we were (roughly third cousins), with about 1% shared DNA. But I didn’t (and still don’t) know the person’s gender or name. The contact used an Ancestry username, which didn’t indicate either gender or first name. I also know that the person’s approximate age is close to mine, because they told me their age in the message.And then things started to get interesting. My cousin (for I know the person is my cousin, even if I don’t know their name) asked ChatGPT to provide insights into our possible relationship based on the DNA data. That included average lifespans and birth and death periods of our shared ancestors.Also: How ChatGPT scanned 170k lines of code in seconds, saving me hours of workI asked this mystery cousin’s permission to tell you about their ChatGPT use, which they granted. Based on the transcript of their session, along with some of my own questions, ChatGPT was able to shed some light on the family connection.In this article, I’m going to show you how I used ChatGPT (and, by extension, how you can use it) to explore genealogy connections between DNA relatives. I’ll show you the prompts, but in most cases, I’ll just summarize the responses, because those can get quite long. How are we related? My starting point was the DNA data itself. According to Ancestry:Shared DNA: 95 cM across 10 segments on my maternal sideUnweighted shared DNA: 95 cMLongest segment: 16 cMAncestry predicted that we were “half 2nd cousin 1x removed,” but the shared DNA quantity doesn’t necessarily place the relationship on a family tree. It just tells you how many jumps away one person is from the other. So those jumps can go equally all the way up and down the tree, or partially up on one side and down an extra generation on the other, or some variety of the two.I started asking ChatGPT about the DNA data. I asked:What does this mean? Shared DNA: 95 cM across 10 segments Unweighted shared DNA: 95 cM Longest segment 16 cMAlso: I spent hours testing ChatGPT Tasks – and its refusal to follow directions was mildly terrifyingI was told that cM is a unit of measurement for genetic linkage. It measures the length of DNA shared between two individuals. The 95 value indicates second cousins or greater. DNA is shared in blocks or segments. The more segments, the closer the relationship. Larger segments indicate closer relationships, while smaller segments indicate more distant relationships.Our shared DNA had few shared segments, and those segments were pretty small. All together, that put us about eight generational hops from each other. More
