I want to start by saying that I hate all of the photo hints I get for clip art and whatnot that people attach to their ancestors. On the one hand, I know I shouldn't be irritated. It's actually enriching to have, say, an appropriate flag to liven up a person's page, or a ship for an immigrant, and I guess I shouldn't begrudge people who want a quick visual aid to remember how many greats go with a grandparent.

On the other hand, all of those bogus coats of arms bring out my cynical side, and now we're seeing things like a double helix or screenshots of match pages to insinuate that an ancestor has been "proven" because someone found an 8th cousin among their DNA matches. Grumble...

At the risk of being annoying, I decided to use this feature for good and attach images to my ancestors that show GEDmatch IDs, with the following goals in mind:

- Increase awareness of GEDmatch among other Ancestry testers
- Increase awareness of using DNA for recent family history research
- Increase awareness of the idea of triangulation among Ancestry customers
- Encourage those who already use GEDmatch to compare themselves to my tests
- Encourage those who already use GEDmatch to share their own numbers either in the comments for the image or with their own graphics, for the benefit of all descendants

[Sidebar: Somewhat related to the last item, I'm dying for some testing company or GEDmatch to come up with "Segment Clubs" - a place where everyone who matches on the same segment can talk to each other in a forum-type environment without the inevitable mess of group emails. Sharing and re-sharing my notes is starting to take way too much time. I may set up a blog and point matches to the relevant post, where they can then make comments, but that's not ideal.]

Below are the two images with my grandmother's GEDmatch ID that I've attached to her ancestors about 6-7 "greats" out. (I don't bother listing her children's IDs, but when I do have multiple tests for the same ancestor, all of the IDs go on the same image.) I made the icons in two different colors depending on whether any triangulation has taken place, which is helpful for me when I'm glancing at my tree in FTM. I hope people will see phrases like "needs to be triangulated" and think "What?! She's saying my ancestor needs something?!" and engage from there.

I added the images a week ago and so far have had one response from a cousin who saw them and uploaded to GEDmatch as a result then contacted me, so I'm pretty happy even if no one else bothers. I know that rephrasing the wording to something like "please compare to (kit number) at GEDmatch.com" would be clearer, but that might be see as spamming another site on Ancestry's turf. Luckily, Googling for "GEDmatch ID" leads to useful results.

If anyone wants to edit these images for use with their own IDs/ancestors, please feel free.