Past Performance is no Guarantee of Future Failure

Perhaps I've been paying too much attention to those somber investment ad warnings. I take such cautions to heart.

Of course, it doesn't help when the sentiment crosses over to an uneasy mix of technophobia and computer-aided genetic genealogy analysis. I've had priors for computer stuff going abysmally wrong. Nevertheless, I held my breath (and my husband's hand) and pushed the button. My task was to download my autosomal DNA results—and X-DNA data file, but only in that order!—from Family Tree DNA, and then upload each file to my newly-established account at GEDmatch.

For some reason, my computer didn't explode. And, best I can tell, I now have the complete range of my readout from Family Tree DNA's autosomal DNA results uploaded to my new account at GEDmatch.

Of course, that doesn't mean I get to play with possibilities quite yet. I noticed, after the several minute wait while the first stage of the upload was processing—the instructions warned it could take five to ten minutes to complete; mine took sixteen; I headed to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich after finishing chromosome six—that the final line said it "may take a couple of days" for batch processing to finish. By that time, I'll have enough inventory to open a sandwich shop, if the nervous energy doesn't persuade me to eat them all, first.

After the uploads were completed, the first wait was for "tokenization." Whatever that is, it was supposed to take another twenty minutes. Fine. Have another sandwich.

Then, mired in all the instructions, blue-inked commentary and red-caps warnings screaming at me, I noticed there was a final line to heed:

We suggest you use the "DNA File Diagnostic Utility" on your Gedmatch.com account home page to verify your FTDNA upload.

Oh. Yeah, maybe I better follow through on this one additional step. A student genetic genealogist's work is never done. Checking, though, simply told me what I already knew. First, my kit was uploaded. Second—though I still don't know what that means—it was tokenized. Third—oh, what a surprise—my kit has not yet completed the batch process, so I can't play around with the one-to-many comparison resources that people are flocking to this site to use.

And, one more thing: just in case I have missed this, in the final red-letter sea of paragraphs, I was told, "no matches were found" for my kit.

Ya think?

The last paragraph of this double-check page provides instructions on how to delete my kit from the site. After all this, I scarcely think that would be foremost on my mind.