RLP 401: Airtable Research Log Updates for 2026

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 401: Airtable Research Log Updates for 2026. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (41s):
This episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast, it’s Research Like a Pro.

Diana (50s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (52s):
I’m great. I am really excited to talk about Airtable. It’s been fun updating the base.

Diana (56s):
Thank you for updating the base because I get to use it. It is so great. I have been updating slides for our DNA Research Like a Pro study group and I’m teaching the introductory lesson where we go through the different DNA testing websites and talk about some of the features that they have. And it’s always so interesting to me to see how almost every single company I have to update something because they’ve changed. And some of them, some of them are big changes, like a complete different look of the website. Ancestry likes to do that sometimes and Living DNA did a whole new look of the website, so that was fun. And then others are just kind of staying the same.

Diana (1m 37s):
So anyway, it’s always really fun beginning of the year to just start fresh with a new DNA project and I’m excited to revisit my Dillard project and I’m sure we’ll be talking about our DNA projects for the next few months here on the podcast. So we’ll keep everybody up to date. But yeah, DNA is amazing and makes me excited to be looking at the information they’re available for us.

Nicole (2m 0s):
Agreed. It was fun last week when you and I looked at 23andMe together because I always log into your account because that’s where I don’t, I haven’t tested there. So I look at your DNA and grandma’s DNA through your account and it was just fun to see that the company is still working on improving the site. I really hope they bring back the chromosome browser, but at least they’re bringing out some new tools that are gonna be so fun to try like the reconstructed ancestor where you can look at the ethnicity estimates for ancestors in your tree based on the tree that you add to in 23andMe. So anyway, it’s just fun to see the new developments.

Diana (2m 38s):
It is And I’m really grateful that 23andMe just kept on going despite all their problems and now they’re going forward and doing new updates and all sorts of fun thing. So yeah, it’s great.

Nicole (2m 52s):
Yeah.

Diana (2m 52s):
Let’s do some announcements. Our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series for 2026 is coming up for Saturday March 21st, 11:00 AM Mountain Time and Heidi Mathis will be presenting, “Adopted Grandfather’s Biological Parents Were Also Adopted: Using atDNA and Y-DNA to Answer Family Mysteries.” So the client’s grandfather was abandoned on his adoptive parents’ front porch in 1939 at age six.

Diana (3m 45s):
Which family stories were true? Was he Polish and abandoned by immigrants? Was he related to his putative biological parents Roberta Overstreet and Robert A. Bach? The client and her uncle’s DNA tests provided the clues needed to point the documentary research in the right direction to answer these family mysteries. Topics will be autosomal and YDNA, Indiana, Oklahoma City, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Our next Research Like a Pro study group, begins August, 2026. And if you’d like to join us as a peer group leader, the application is on our website. Please join our newsletter that comes out every Monday to see our latest posts, podcasts, upcoming lectures and coupon codes for any sales that we have going on. Well, today we are talking about the Research Like a Pro with DNA Airtable research log. Nicole, you updated it for 2026. Yay. It’s always so great to get the updated version. So this is version 4.2 and it has several enhancements designed to streamline our DNA research workflow and make tracking those Matches more efficient.

Diana (4m 32s):
So while the changes might make it look a little different, the base, especially in the DNA match details, Nicole, you think that these improvements will make our research process smoother and that’s what we’re always looking for, making it a little bit smoother, more efficient, a little bit better. So for anyone who hasn’t tried the Airtable templates, you can find those at Airtable Universe and this is called Research Like a Pro RLP with DNA Research Log 4.2. It comes in two versions. One is prefilled with examples so you can see what you should be putting in it and one is blank.

Diana (5m 12s):
So when you already understand how to use it, you can just go forward filling it in with your own data.

Nicole (5m 19s):
So why did I make these changes? Well, part of the reason for the changes is that every year before the DNA study group, I go in and see how we can improve things based on the last year of using it and comments and user feedback. But the goal of this update was to basically create more flexibility in how we track DNA relationships and then of course always reduce data entry duplication. So with testing companies like Ancestry now showing Pro shared Matches, how much your Matches share with each other, which is something that 23andMe and MyHeritage have done also in the past, they always have. It’s just, it seemed like it was time to update the way we conceptualize and label the test taker and the DNA match fields, basically the two people involved in the DNA match.

Nicole (6m 6s):
And we always say test taker and kind of conceptualize that as the person who’s taking the DNA test who has given us access to view their results, whether it’s yourself, your mom, your dad, your grandparent, uncle, cousin, whoever it is. The way we think about it in Research Like a Pro with DNA is a test taker or your test takers are people who have shared their results with you. So you can go and see their match list and their their ancestry estimates and all that. And then the DNA match person is somebody in the match list. Well now when you can compare two people in the DNA Match list to each other and see how much they share using the Pro Tools Shared Matches at Ancestry and the Shared Matches list at Family Tree DNA and actually Family tree DNA, I believe you can see how much people share with each other if you put them in the matrix.

Nicole (6m 58s):
So that’s another way you can do that. I don’t think you can see it in the in common with list at Family Tree DNA, but in the matrix you can, right?

Diana (7m 5s):
Yes, I believe so.

Nicole (7m 6s):
And then at 23andMe and MyHeritage in the Shared Matches list where you can see how much those people in the Shared Matches list share with each with the match. So anyway, it’s a great way to get more DNA evidence without having to get more people to share their results with you just by looking at the Shared Matches and seeing how much these share with each other.

Diana (7m 27s):
Yay. I’m so glad because this has been confusing and we’ve had a lot of questions in the course or the study group about how to deal with that. So the biggest change that we’re going to see in the DNA match details table is that instead of test taker and DNA match fields, we just have person one and person two, which is very simple. And now we have new possibilities for the research. So as you said before this, you could only record the DNA shared between a test taker and their match. And now the field titles show you can record the DNA shared between any two people including matches and their shared matches.

Diana (8m 8s):
So this will be great. You’ve already mentioned the companies, but let’s just reiterate, Ancestry Pro Shared Matches showing how much DNA two people share with each other and then MyHeritage, which has already always showed that. And then Family Tree DNA in the matrix and then 23andMe as well. And also as you were talking I thought about GEDMatch and in GEDMatch we also have the information about how much people share with each other. So this will be so great. So for example, if you, let’s say you manage a test for your uncle and you discover two matches who share DNA with each other, you can now create a record showing their relationship even though neither one is your test taker, you don’t have access to their results, you don’t administer their test or anything, they just show up.

Diana (8m 59s):
And then you can have one of them be person one and the other one be person two, and now you can have a more complete picture of how your DNA matches all cluster together and relate to each other.

Nicole (9m 12s):
Yes, that’s perfect. And I did wanna go back to 23andMe just for a second because at the bottom of each match page at 23andMe it says you have relatives in common and then you can click on view the relatives in common. And it used to be that it would show you when you have segments that overlap, but ever since the data breach a couple years ago, they haven’t showed that anymore. So it’s kind of frustrating, sad, but it does still tell you the percentage that each person shares with the match whose match page you’re on. So it does tell you that in percentages, not centimorgans,

Diana (9m 52s):
But you can change the percentages to centimorgans if you go over to the Shared Centimorgan Project on DNA Painter and put that in and it will tell you what the centimorgans are. So it is so interesting how each one of these companies just has their own way of doing things and we have to learn how to deal with that.

Nicole (10m 10s):
Yes. And I think a lot of the time I personally just rely on Ancestry to get so much of the evidence for DNA because it has such a huge database and it has so many more trees than the others. But some of the really strong evidence that I used in my Barsheba Tharp case came from 23andMe there was just one tester that was there and not in Ancestry and she happened to be a really good important one who was also in GEDMatch. So finding her in both of those places was really valuable. And so I think it’s important that we do check the other companies, even if we use one primarily because we can really learn a lot from them. Anyway, tangent over.

Diana (10m 48s):
Well, I agree with that, especially if you’re working with maybe an adoptee case. Well, what I found is a lot of adoptees do test at 23andMe. They wanna know their health history because they don’t have that, you know, they don’t have that biological line telling them, you know, grandpa had heart disease or or whatever. And so they’ll test there and they show up there and sometimes they are like the closest match for a case you’re working on. So you really do benefit from fishing in every pond. As we have said back in the day when DNA first came out, we heard that a lot. Get your tests everywhere.

Nicole (11m 26s):
Absolutely. Well let’s talk more about the people who are matching DNA and how we manage their trees because keeping track of two people who share DNA and how many centimorgans they share wouldn’t be complete without doing an analysis of both of their family trees to try to find the common ancestor. So in Airtable we think it’s so important to save a link to each person’s family tree. And so for example, with Ancestry, we would look in the match list and then find a person and then usually they either have a family tree attached to their DNA results or they have a family tree that’s not attached to their results, but they still have that tree you can look at or you have to contact them and then build their tree for them.

Nicole (12m 13s):
But any of those situations, there’s eventually going to be a link to a family tree or at least a position within your, your master tree, however you’re doing it. And so it’s a great practice to save tree URLs for all of these people who are DNA Matches to each other. And one of the new improvements for Airtable this year is the centralization of family tree URLs or links. And these previously appeared in the DNA match details table as well as the kit access table for the test takers or the people who have shared the results with you in the kit access. And then for like DNA Matches, you could put the tree links in when you added them as a DNA match to one of your test takers.

Nicole (12m 58s):
But now all the tree links are going to be stored exclusively in the people table. And this will just make it easier for only putting the URL for their tree in one place and not having to update it if you have multiple rows with that person in your DNA match details table. So the people table now includes two new fields. The first one’s called tree URL for the primary tree, often Ancestry or MyHeritage. And then there’s also a second tree URL field tree, URL number two, for another tree link on a different platform. So maybe they have one at MyHeritage or FamilySearch or WikiTree. So you can save those.

Nicole (13m 39s):
And if you end up having a project where you have more need for more fields, you can just add a number three tree URL field and that would be fine. But the primary tree URL now appears as a lookup field in the DNA match details table and in the kit access table. And if you don’t wanna see it there, you can hide it, but it is nice to see it in the DNA match details table. So I put that there. So it just means you only have to enter that tree information once in the people table. Then anytime you add a match involving that person in DNA match details, the tree URL will just populate there automatically, and any time that person appears somewhere in the base, you can just click on their name and see their tree URL.

Nicole (14m 25s):
So no more pasting the same URL for a person who Matches multiple people in your project.

Diana (14m 31s):
Wonderful. This will save us so much time. All these little things add up. Now let’s have a word from our Sponsor.

Diana (15m 11s):
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Diana (15m 51s):
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Diana (16m 35s):
So when you add an admin for a test, Airtable automatically creates reciprocal fields called Ancestry kits managed and MyHeritage kits managed in the people table for the person who’s the admin. This makes it easy to see all the kits a particular person manages, which can be helpful for noticing patterns. And if you need to contact them about multiple Matches, then there’s the usernames field. I think we’ve all seen that DNA Matches often don’t use their real names on testing companies. And so this is a long text field and you can record the pseudonym or username they use so you can remember what they’re going by at each test company even after you figured out their real name and updated your records.

Diana (17m 19s):
So these are great, they’re just small tweaks that will be really nice to have.

Nicole (17m 24s):
Yeah, And I wasn’t sure the best way to do the usernames field because in some ways it makes the most sense to put that in the DNA match details table because people might have a different username at each company. And so I even thought about making a new table for just information about one person at that at one company, but then that just seemed too complicated. So I’m trying to keep this simple enough that it’s not too hard for data entry anyway, it just made sense to put it there and to allow it to have multiple rows, so like multiple within the cell, you can have multiple lines that say like username in Ancestry is this, username at MyHeritage is that it’s just kind of uncommon in my own personal research to have to do that for multiple people ’cause sometimes they’ll have their actual name at MyHeritage and then a username at Ancestry.

Diana (18m 18s):
Right.

Nicole (18m 18s):
And like at 23andMe, it’s usually their full name that appears not a username. So it’s mostly Ancestry that has like initials or usernames. And I really just prefer putting in their full name. And so sometimes if I know their first initial and then I can look at their tree and figure out their last name, I’ll put that as their name. But I, it’s really important to keep track of the username too because the username is what they’re going by in the match list. So that’s what you’re gonna see everywhere.

Diana (18m 47s):
So when we’re putting in our people, we are going to want to use their full name, if we know it, as opposed to their username.

Nicole (18m 57s):
That’s how I personally like to do it. But sometimes I will put in their username in quotes and at the end as if it’s like a nickname, you know? So you can put in, yeah, that’s true for like the people table, the first primary field is their name. And so if you know their whole name and their username and you wanna be able to see all of those when you’re looking at a match’s name in other places in the base, you can just put in Joe Smith and then in quotes “J Smith 245.”

Diana (19m 29s):
I like that idea too. That’s a good idea. I think it just all comes down to what situation you’re dealing with and what makes most sense with your brain and how you enter this information that makes, that’s a big deal. We want it to make sense with our own brains ’cause we’re the ones using it.

Nicole (19m 46s):
Yeah, so there’s a lot of flexibility in the Airtable base for people to change things and add things and, and once you copy it to your base, it’s yours and you can do whatever you want to make it work with your brain. Okay. So next let’s talk about the timeline table. There was just one little tweak there to streamline things and make it easier for date sorting. So the timeline table improvement is just that there’s a sortable date field from last year, but now it’s a formula field that automatically converts whatever date you enter into the event date field. It converts it into a standardized sortable format month, day, year, So that you can sort by that field of the sortable date field and then if you sort by that, everything will go into order.

Nicole (20m 36s):
And then you don’t have to try to type out the sortable date, which you had to do last year. You can just type in what you know. So if an event occurred in March of 1857, just simply type that in the date field, then the sortable date field with its formula will automatically populate as March 1st, 1857. Making it easy to chronologically sort your timeline without having to manually format each date. And I really wanted to be able to preserve the actual date that you know, and sometimes you just know like a quarter of the year, like January through March of that year, maybe you know a range of dates and you wanna be able to put a range of years or something.

Nicole (21m 16s):
But then if you try to sort by that, it won’t work. So it’s nice to have the sortable date next to it. And you can even hide that field if you don’t wanna see it. But just knowing that it will automatically sort your timeline based on that sortable date field.

Diana (21m 32s):
Well, I love that and I needed that for this court case project that I just did because I had 12 court orders within two years. And so I would have like June, 1772 and then August, 1772 and so on. And I was manually putting them in order because I didn’t have a sortable date column. The way, you know, this will now work, which I could do that, but this will be so nice to make it easy for. So just to clarify, in the sortable date column, I could just, or field, I could just type in January 3rd, 1886, and then it will automatically take what I typed and put it in the correct way.

Diana (22m 14s):
You know, it’ll put it in the day, month, year, or month, day year, correct.

Nicole (22m 20s):
Right. Yes.

Diana (22m 20s):
I love that because I struggle with trying to get those things in there. I’m so used to doing the way we do genealogy dates, but when I have to put it in like the typical way to do dates, I always have to stop and think about if I’m doing it correctly. So if I don’t have to think about that, it will be awesome. Okay, well what stayed the same? So everyone who’s thinking, oh no, we have all these changes. So the following tables are just the same as you’ve ever seen them. So your existing workflows will be exactly as before. Locations, the FANs, which is the friends, associates, and neighbors table where we track all those people important for the research, the citation templates table, segments, surnames and shared centimorgans.

Diana (23m 5s):
And the research log table also remains largely the same with the only minor description updates to the timeline and add to timeline fields for clarity. So pretty much it’s going to look the same.

Nicole (23m 20s):
Yes, it shouldn’t be that different. Well, if you’re wondering, you know, now I wanna take all my old bases and transition to this new base. If you’re thinking that, here’s some tips for making the transition. So first of all, maybe don’t worry about converting all of your old bases to the new template, because if you’re not working on that project right now, it’s probably not that important. And then anytime you start a new project, just start with the 2026 base for new projects. But if you do decide to take one of your older bases that you worked on recently and you wanna continue working on this year, then you’ll need to move the tree URLs from the match details table to the people table.

Nicole (24m 2s):
Then the next thing we recommend is copying and pasting. So if you can just set up your two bases to have the same number of columns in same order, then you can take a couple rows of data and copy and paste it from the old to the new and see how it looks. And if it’s working right, then you can do a few more. And then you can migrate most of your data just that way by copying and pasting it. And the arrangement of the fields might be a little bit different. So you can hide some of the fields in the new base or, or just change a little bit that way. Hide fields in the old base, you can drag and drop fields to be on a different order if you need to, but just get things set up So that they look as similar as possible.

Nicole (24m 46s):
And then you can copy and paste that data. Now another option is that if you are tech savvy and comfortable with Airtable, you might prefer just taking your old 4.0 or 4.1 Airtable base and make the field and column changes yourself and the formula change. I do have a change log in a Google doc that you can use to help you see all the different changes that I made. You know, deleting a field here, adding a field there, and that kind of thing. So if you’d rather do it that way, sometimes that’s a little bit easier, and that’s how I tend to make changes to my older workspaces in Airtable is just by, oh, okay, I wanna work on my Dyer research.

Nicole (25m 27s):
Oh, it doesn’t have this feature that I want. I’m just gonna go ahead and make the changes manually by adding the field that I need and changing this to a formula and whatnot. So you can see the Google Doc in the show notes of this podcast or the blog post that goes along with this podcast toward the end. You can click that link and view my Google doc with all of the changes that I made to help guide you if you want to do it yourself.

Diana (25m 49s):
Wow. Thanks for providing that. That is super helpful. I am considering what I’m going to do with my Dillard DNA project, but the base I was using then is pretty old because it’s been at least two years, so I’ll probably just migrate to the new one. I always like to start with the new one anyway because it, you know, it’s just fun to start fresh And I like to copy and paste. I mean, I don’t love it, but I don’t mind doing it, it’s okay.

Nicole (26m 16s):
I just love copy and pasting. It’s so fun.

Diana (26m 18s):
It’s my favorite thing in the world. Actually. You know what I do, and I probably shouldn’t say this, but if I’m in a boring meeting sometimes I’ll spend the time where I’m listening to other people talk, copying and pasting. It’s a great way to use that time when you’re just, you have to be there, but maybe you’re not have to be that involved.

Nicole (26m 37s):
Yeah, it’s, I see what you’re saying because you’re doing something that’s kind of like busy work at a time where you don’t need your full attention applied, but you’re kind kind of there and so you can kind of do two things at once.

Diana (26m 48s):
Oh, multitasking. Which I don’t know if that’s really good for our brains, But it does help me get things done. Well, I hope everyone has had fun listening to us talk about these updates. And if, you know, if you’ve been kind of reluctant to try Airtable, I would just recommend that you try it. It is so fun. It’s so amazing. And we’ve had people that do our study group and they’ll say, I was an Excel user and I was never gonna change, but now I love Airtable. So you know it. It is what it is. But these changes Nicole’s made are really designed to help make our workflow more efficient because we, we want to spend less time on data entry and more time on analysis and discovery, which is what we love.

Diana (27m 30s):
And the only reason we’ve been able to really update this and make so many changes is from feedback, user feedback. So if you have ideas about how the base can be improved, just add it to comments for this podcast. And if you want to know more about the Research, Like a Pro DNA Airtable base, you can visit our YouTube Airtable playlist or checkout our Research Like a Pro with DNA e-course where we do have comprehensive training on using the research log for genetic genealogy projects. So good luck everyone, as you try out Airtable and as you work on adding more DNA Matches and sources and timeline entries.

Nicole (28m 13s):
Yeah, And I guess we should also say we have our Airtable quick reference guides that you can purchase as well, which are PDFs you can download and you can print them and laminate them or just reead them on your computer. But if you’re looking for something like that, the link is in the show notes. All right, thanks so much for talking about this with me today, and thank you to all of our listeners. We hope that you have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

Diana (28m 39s):
Bye-Bye everyone.

Nicole (29m 17s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.