Keeping track of DNA links

[DavidWright]

I wonder if anyone has a good way of using Reunion to keep track of ancestors who are 'confirmed' by DNA links to cousins. In other words they have cropped up on ancestry.com or elsewhere as a shared ancestor with someone else.
It would be nice to be able to print a chart which marked these, as it would highlight branches which might have incorrect links in them.
Also, as a question for Leister folk - do you plan to include a way of recording the cM value of links between individuals?

[Howard Fink]

I use tags to identify confirmed DNA matches. I defined several for different branches. They are all labelled "DNA Match - [surname]". I like that they show up obviously on each person's card with distinctive colors, but are fairly unobtrusive - even when a person has multiple tags. (Obviously my own card has several on it.)

It's easy to do a search on tag values and find every match on any branch, and if you want to make a chart to find the MCRA (Most Recent Common Ancestor) that is easy to create using the Find Relationship chart function.

You can define tags to show up when you generate other charts as well. When I do this I often add a drop shadow to the boxes that contain a DNA match to make them really stand out.

[eric.vanbeest]

For my own part, I use Color Tags to trace descendants of (a selection of) my forefathers. The scheme I use is based on the color generated by the Fan chart starting with me, so 4 forefathers in the lower part lower left quadrant are tagged blue and the 4 in the upper half of the lower left quadrant are purple, etc. (The forefathers that are tagged are the ancestors in the male line starting up from the GGG Grandfather)

I’d like to add more but the numer of colours that Reunion makes available is limited and the number of color tags available is limited too (I must have reached this limit somewhere when suddenly Reunion went 'agaargh' and all tags disappeared).

This scheme falls down obvious and easily:
* If a GGG Grandfather is missing because I haven’t been able to get that far; I use the earliest (male) ancestor in that branch
* If in the branch up there is an unwed mother; the branch continues via her
* If more than 1 branch up leads to the same forefather – it is colored using the line closest through the male line (my grandmother is her own 6C1R).

The only question I had was at which level back to stop. Some branches in my tree go back 13+ generations, while my patrilineal tree only goes back 10, and others I could not trace back further than 7. I decided to go back to only at most 7 generations (5G Grandfather), so that each would have equal weighting when it comes to me.

The only downside on Color Tags - apart from the limited number you may (appear to) have and the limited number of colours – is that they are not additive; ie. if person A is descendant from ancestor X and person B is descendant of ancestor X, the child C of A and B will merely be descendant of ancestor X, so there is no visual feedback to multiple descendancy.