Pedigree Thief, a Chrome browser extension by Colin Thomson for genealogists is a “genealogy data gathering tool”, and it does a few very handy things for those using MyHeritage and Geni for their genealogy research. It reads pedigree trees from Geni and MyHeritage, as well as converting the data to the Ahnentafel format (and there is a Pedigree to GEDCOM function).
It also helps with pulling data into the Genealogical DNA Analysis Tool (GDAT) (link) which I feel like should be mentioned along with Pedigree Thief. GDAT is a separate macOS, Linux, and Windows genealogical DNA tool by Becky Mason Walker (Beckins LLC) that utilizes autosomal DNA when researching family trees. GDAT has been around for several years (and actually replaced Genome Mate and Genome Mate Pro). One huge feature/advantage of GDAT is that it stores your DNA data locally (encrypted) on your own computer and not an online service.
It can read information on matches from MyHeritage, 23AndMe, FTDNA, and GedMatch, along with adding functionality to some GedMatch web pages, and it utilizes the DNAGedcom Client and Pedigree Thief to do so.
I’m barely scratching the surface on these two utilities: Please read the GDAT site (link) and the Pedigree Thief Facebook Page for a lot more details. For a look at importing data, see the import page (link) and check the help page (link) to get a sense of what GDAT can do for you.
GDAT was updated back in June (at least on the Windows side), and Pedigree Thief was updated earlier this week (Pedigree Thief release notes):
- This update is for MyHeritage and gives the user the option to read the DNA from the Chromosome Browser pages or not.
- On the Matches page and the Match page the Read button now includes the label ‘(with DNA)’. There is also a new button ‘(no DNA)’. The first will invoke the Chromosome Browser so is prone to trigger MyHeritage’s data restriction. The ‘no DNA’ option will only gather the minimum data to populate GDAT with using the browser.
Note: The data restriction problem with MyHeritage is discussed in this Facebook thread and is exactly what it sounds like – you can pull down a large amount of data and trigger MyHeritage to throttle or temporarily block you.
It’s been some time since I’ve downloaded large amounts of DNA information/matches (I used to do it every so often on Ancestry), so I’m curious to see what I can find with MyHeritage when I try it out.
Pedigree Thief Screenshots (from the official site):