DNAGedcom Academy

A free 2-week course included with every subscription — from installing the Client to seeing your DNA matches organized into family clusters.

Eight short lessons, each one a 10–20 minute hands-on task. Work through them in order, at your own pace. Your progress is saved in this browser.

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1. Install & Set Up Right

Install the Client on your computer, log in, and put your database somewhere safe — the five-minute setup that prevents the most common problems later.

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2. Your First Gather

Download your closest DNA matches into your own database in about 15 minutes. This is the moment DNAGedcom starts working for you.

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3. See What You Got

Open the Matches tool, sort and filter your new match list, and find your data files on disk. Your matches, your computer, your rules.

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4. Round Two: ICW, Trees & Segments

Run a second gather pass to add shared-match relationships, family trees, and chromosome segments — the data that powers clustering.

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5. Your First Cluster

The “aha” moment: one click turns a wall of match names into colored family groups, each pointing at a branch of your tree.

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6. Reading Clusters & Breaking Brick Walls

What a cluster actually tells you, and the cluster → shared matches → hypothesis workflow genealogists use to break through brick walls.

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7. Going Deeper

Add a second testing service, try Shared Clustering and the Chromosome Matrix, and lower your cM threshold to reach more distant cousins.

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8. The Gold Toolkit Gold

Warthen Interactive Cluster, Common Ancestors, and My Trees — what each Gold tool adds and when it's worth reaching for.

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Prefer to learn live?

Join a free DNAGedcom office-hours session — a live walkthrough of these same lessons with time for your questions, hosted on Zoom.

See the schedule

Looking for reference documentation instead? Visit the Help Center.