I’ve organized this post so that it goes from the very basics to things that require more advanced skills. Once you’ve mastered the earlier stuff you should be ready to move onto the more difficult stuff.

Try Lost Cousins’ Masterclass. While you’re there, if you have ancestors on the 1880 UK, Canadian or American census, make an account and enter those family members to see if you can connect with your Lost Cousins. You can sign up for the newsletter which is both informative and entertaining, especially if you have ancestors from the UK.

Make a family tree! Ideally the tree is connected to your DNA results at the site where you did your DNA test, but there are many places online you can build a family tree, some of which are completely free. I wrote a post about where you can do this. Here’s an interesting post from the DNAgeek that talks about how you can colour code your tree using the colours used to tag your DNA matches on Ancestry.

Figure out who your DNA matches are! Use shared matches to classify people by family -if a DNA match shares DNA with a known cousin, then they must somehow be related to the same branch of the family that cousin is on. Make notes and, if you’re using Ancestry, colour code your DNA matches. Here’s another post by the DNAgeek that talks about this feature. You may even want to send a message to the match, especially if they have no family tree and there are no shared matches. Here’s a post I wrote about how to do that. Connecting with cousins is my favourite part of DNA testing!

Allison Wilde made a fantastic YouTube video about how to sort through your match lists and add comments to flag issues and signal which matches might be of interest if there’s a particular question you’re working on.

Here’s a post I made about clustering. It will give you the basics of clustering and why it might help you. Try the Leeds Method to do manual clustering, or check out places online that are doing automatic clustering, like Genetic Affairs.

Consider joining a surname project. Some surname projects are for YDNA and mtDNA results, but some are for autosomal results and there are gathering places (like Facebook pages) for people who have a surname in their tree.

Read my two posts on DNA here and here. If you understood the concepts In those posts and want to delve more deeply into those topics, read this book.

Learn about centimorgans (cM). You can verify that your known matches fall in the correct range or see what the most likely relationship is for unknown matches here. This is probably the tool I use the most when working with DNA.

Download your DNA and then upload your DNA to other sites. Here’s a great post from Roberta Estes with links to other posts on how to download/upload your DNA from/to various sites.

If you originally did your DNA test with Ancestry, you won’t have access to a chromosome browser. But once you transfer your DNA to other sites that do, you can learn about chromosome browsers and how they can help further your DNA research.

Once you’ve got chromosome browsers down pat, learn about triangulation.

Once you understand the principle of triangulation, you can give it a try. If you need a way to keep track of all your overlapping DNA matches, check out DNAPainter. You can watch a YouTube video of how to use it here, and read a post that explains very clearly how to use it here.

Rootsfinder is a third party tool that does a number of things. It also has a clustering tool, and a way to paint your matches. You can try out a basic plan for free.

Did I miss any DNA basics? Are there other third party tools you like to use? Let me know in the comments!