Getting started with your raw DNA

What is raw DNA?

When you take an autosomal DNA test, the lab reads hundreds of thousands of positions ("SNPs") across your 22 pairs of chromosomes and writes the result as two letters at each position — for example AG, meaning you inherited an A from one parent and a G from the other. That plain text file is your raw data.

Testing companies use it to produce their ethnicity estimate and match lists, but the file itself is yours. RomanyDNA re-reads it with our own matching engine, which is what lets you compare against people from any company — not just the one you tested with.

Every file is on the forward (+) strand and build 37 / 37.1, and all the major vendors use the same positions, so cross-company comparison works.

Downloading your raw data file

Log in to the site where you tested and look for a "Download raw data", "Download DNA data" or "Export" option in your account settings. The file is usually a .txt or .zip.

Don't rename or edit the file — upload it exactly as downloaded. A .zip containing the raw file is fine too.

Uploading it

1. Create a free account and click the link in the confirmation email. You must confirm your email before you can upload.
2. Go to Upload and fill in the donor name, the testing company, and the sex if you know it.
3. Choose the file (or drag it in) and submit. Plain .txt/.csv, gzipped .gz and zipped .zip are all accepted, up to 150 MB unpacked.
4. We detect the format automatically, normalise the genotypes and give the kit a number.

Sex is detected from the data itself. If you leave sex blank we set it from the Y-chromosome call rate (males) or X-chromosome heterozygosity (females); if your choice contradicts the data we warn you and trust the data.

Kit numbers

Every kit gets a short code made of a vendor prefix and its number, similar to GEDmatch. You can use it anywhere a kit is requested — matching, comparison, WATO, tree DNA.

So AN000003 is the third kit on the site and an AncestryDNA upload; VK000046 is a reconstructed Tree DNA kit. A trailing P or M marks a phased paternal or maternal kit.

Privacy and deletion

Your kits live under your account. You can delete a kit at any time from DNA Kits, which removes both the uploaded raw file and the parsed data.

Matching compares only kits on this site. You are not sending your data to any third party, and the tools that show other people's kits do so under the site's shared-family-tree model.

What happens next

After upload your kit is immediately compared against the kits it can see. Close matches are ready straight away; the full scan completes within a few minutes (the matcher runs every five minutes), and while a pair is still being computed you'll see a "still processing" note instead of a number.

Once matching is done, open One-to-Many to see your match list, or continue to the matching guide.