How do you set the gender of a person in your family tree?

Q: How do you set the gender of a person in your family tree?

A: DNA matches no longer contain gender information since January 2022 (23andMe removed this data).

The issue comes up when a MRCA is found, because our app needs to know the gender of the MRCA (which is a parent in the simplest use case, when both the parent and child are in the same triangulated group with you).

Here's how you can resolve the issue by setting the gender of your DNA matches to male or female (from unknown):

Step 1: Click on the corresponding triangulated group

You can either click on the "TG" icon and select the right TG or click on a green "New TG" or "New Cousin" card.

Once you're in the right TG, click on "Smart Tree" in the left submenu to view a list of your cousins:

You can see that those DNA cousins with an "unknown" gender have a "secret person" icon instead of a blue or pink person (like Michael and Patricia in this example).

Step 2: Click on the DNA cousin that you want to assign a gender to

Nyko has no gender, so he is depicted in neutral colors (as opposed to the usual blue/pink).

Step 3: Edit the family tree tile by clicking on the pencil icon

Note that none of the radio buttons (Male/Female) are selected. Also, the modal is teal in color and displays "- set gender" in the header. According to a Google search, 100% of people with the name Nyko are boys. In other words, we can safely assign "Male" to Nyko.

Note that we are only looking at gender from a genetic perspective. The person may be non-binary or may feel uncomfortable with the biological gender, however, for the purposes of our app, we need to assign the biological gender when people are candidates for most recent common ancestor (MRCA).

This is also true for ancestors in your or your DNA cousin's family tree. It is essential that everyone has either a male or female gender, or the app will produce an error when attempting to identify MRCAs. The system will regularly search through the family tree data you imported and remove those with no gender information!

Step 4: After selecting the "Male" radio button, click on the orange "Save" button.

As you can see, the modal changes color (in this case to blue) and the radio button is now enabled:

In addition, Nyko's family tree tile now has a blue background:

Repeat these steps for any other DNA cousins who have no gender assigned.