I can only feel the pain of those of you who have multiple kits..even with only one, I was drowning in data from four places.

In the end, I am using genome mate to help narrow down my priorities in further research. By lining up everyone from three sources with raw data, I can quickly see overlap on specific chromes and then explore further. (I was trying to do a master spread sheet from all three companies, but it was a nightmare of cut, paste, be sure to start at the right place, get the name etc). But my main delight is being able to be better able to match all of them with an ancestry match.

On the ancestry.com chrome extension, I have basically given up doing full scans to pick up all the information (including ancestors); I just scan the names of matches so I can pull them up on the ancestry.com side more easily. If you are just doing the names of matches as a tool to be able to find one again, it scans fairly fast (you just sit and watch the page numbers go by and when it stalls, you start again from that page. I have 287 pages now, but it doesn't take more than four or five restarts to do it but you can't leave the computer while it is doing it because you need to remember the page to restart at! But it is only a 10-15 minute chore! (You just kill the program when it reaches the end and starts opening up each match, from the beginning) For those people who use a surname for at least part of their user name at ancestry, it is much easier to then try to match them to a FTDNA, 23&me or Gedmatch user who uses a surname (even just part of it) by using the relative surname search tool at genome mate. For those ancestry people with "creative user names", it is much harder but possible....

By the way, I resolved my issue about the name of the match when you merge a gedmatch user and an ancestry user (it appears as the gedmatch name in blue on the chrome browser still, but is no longer searchable by gedmatch kit number) by simply changing the name of the ancestry match by adding the gedmatch number to it. Since the relative search function doesn't require exact match, putting in A111111 alone will now pull up the match by (ancestry user name) - A111111. Seems like a good solution since people may have different preferences for searches and for me, this allows me to recover a gedmatch kit that I merged and can't remember the ancestry name or which chrome we shared (alternative way to pull it back up). It may cause duplications when you try to do more bulk uploads from ancestry, but I don't think it will be too burdensome to clean out duplicates.

Still a lot of learning and tricks to maximizing usage and it must be much harder for multiple kit owners. A huge benefit nevertheless for single kit with massive data from the four companies.

I would urge anyone getting started in atdna to start using this application initially to store your data. Many of us who have doing this stuff for a year or so are having to convert prior work, but it is worth it!

Edit: sorry - somehow I accidentally posted this in middle of thread when I meant to put it in today at top.