Ancestor Circle DNA

GEDitCOM II extension | Mick Reed, REED / MAXWELL Family History | Full-circle companion to Fan Chart DNA

What it does

Draws one person’s ancestry as a full circle: the person at the centre, the father’s ancestry in the top half and the mother’s in the bottom half. Every ancestor is a wedge with name and dates, and every wedge opens that person’s record.

Because the ancestors are spread round the whole circle rather than half of it, each wedge has twice the room it has in the Fan Chart, so one more generation fits at the same text size.

This version adds three buttons above the chart that mark the ancestors from whom the person at the centre inherited Y-chromosome, mitochondrial and X-chromosome DNA. Without the overlays it is the same chart as Ancestor Circle.

Running it

Generations	Outermost ring	Ancestor places
6	3× great-grandparents	62
7	4× great-grandparents	126
8	5× great-grandparents	254

Generations

Outermost ring

Ancestor places

3× great-grandparents

4× great-grandparents

126

5× great-grandparents

254

Reading the chart

DNA overlays

Click a button to show its overlay, again to hide it; any combination can be shown together. Each marked wedge gets a thick coloured border and a dot near its outer edge, and the centre circle is marked too.

Button	Colour	Marks
Y-chromosome	Soft yellow	Father to son, unchanged: the father’s father’s line straight up the far left of the top half. Only if the centre person is male.
Mitochondrial	Pale green	Mother to every child, unchanged: the mother’s mother’s line, which ends at the far left of the bottom half.
X-chromosome	Soft orange	A man gets his X only from his mother; a woman from both parents. Worked out generation by generation from each person’s recorded sex.

Button

Colour

Marks

Y-chromosome

Soft yellow

Father to son, unchanged: the father’s father’s line straight up the far left of the top half. Only if the centre person is male.

Mitochondrial

Pale green

Mother to every child, unchanged: the mother’s mother’s line, which ends at the far left of the bottom half.

X-chromosome

Soft orange

A man gets his X only from his mother; a woman from both parents. Worked out generation by generation from each person’s recorded sex.

Overlays mark empty wedges too, to show which unresearched lines matter for each kind of DNA. Where a child’s sex is not recorded, the father is still marked as a possible X contributor.

The X pattern is far easier to see in a full circle: for a man, the whole top half (his father’s side) stays unmarked.

Zoom and printing

The chart opens scaled to fit the window. The zoom slider enlarges it up to 400%; scroll to move round. To print, open the report in Safari and use File › Print › Save as PDF; A3 suits 8 generations.

Which chart? Fan Chart DNA — one person, half circle, 6 generations, DNA overlays. Ancestor Circle DNA — the same overlays on a full circle, up to 8 generations. Couple Circle — a husband and wife, each with their ancestry in one half.

Things to bear in mind

Only each person’s first parent family is followed.

Where relatives married (pedigree collapse), the same person appears in more than one wedge, as they should.

The overlays show which ancestors could have passed on each kind of DNA; autosomal DNA, which comes from all ancestors in varying amounts, is not shown.

Years are read from qualified and range dates too (ABT 1850, BET 1850 AND 1855).

Date	Notes
31 OCT 2026	First version, developed from Fan Chart DNA and Ancestor Circle: full circle, father above and mother below, 6–8 generations, Y, mt and X overlays, hover names, zoom, packaged as an extension.

Date

Notes

31 OCT 2026

First version, developed from Fan Chart DNA and Ancestor Circle: full circle, father above and mother below, 6–8 generations, Y, mt and X overlays, hover names, zoom, packaged as an extension.