Genetic Affairs

[chiddicks]

very disappointed to see that Ancestry have cut and banned the link to DNA clustering company Genetic Affairs, this was a great tool.


On Friday the 20th of May 2020 I obtained a cease and desist letter from ZwillGen, the legal representatives from Ancestry.
In short, Ancestry wants me to stop offering the AutoCluster analyses that employ Ancestry data.

This is the announcement that I created for my users:

"Hi all, I am afraid I will have to inform you that our, sometimes rocky, journey with Ancestry has come to a sudden end. I just obtained a cease and desist letter from ZwillGen, the legal representatives from Ancestry.

When I started Genetic Affairs in 2018 and released AutoCluster I couldn't have imagined the impact it would have on the genetic genealogy and its amazing userbase. Partly this success can be attributed to the unprecedented DNA database of Ancestry. I also realized that to keep a sustainable relationship with them I should implement rate-limiting measures to minimize the computational impact on Ancestry's servers.

For this reason, I implemented a queue system that only allowed for a limited number of parallel analyses. Moreover, instead of downloading all (shared) matches Genetic Affairs only focuses on the top fraction of matches, which have the highest probability of generating relevant hypotheses. We also motivate our user base to employ our targeted clustering approaches, thereby focusing only on a subset of matches.

Despite our best efforts to be a good neighbor, Ancestry requested that we stop providing our services to you, their customers, to cluster your matches.

It is therefore with great sadness and disappointment that I must withdraw support for Ancestry from our site at this moment. Please remember that it is still possible to utilize the AutoCluster analysis if you transfer your DNA results to MyHeritage and FTDNA.

I would like to thank our Ancestry users for their continued support and wish you all good luck with the remainder of your genetic genealogy journey.

Evert-Jan Blom - Genetic Affairs - info@geneticaffairs.com

https://www.geneticaffairs.com/ "

[peterd]

My Heritage does the auto cluster doesn't it as I did mine and my mothers