Academy › Live Office Hours

Live Office Hours

Office hours are free, live Zoom sessions built around your questions — whether you're stuck on your first gather or deep into a brick-wall hunt. It's a conversation, not a lecture: you bring what you're working on, we work through it together, and we open the Client on screen whenever seeing it helps. No preparation required.

Register for office hours

How it works

  • Format: 45 minutes on Zoom, question-driven. Whoever shows up sets the agenda; when the room is quiet we pull something from the topic list below.
  • Registration: free, via the button above — upcoming session dates are listed right on the registration page. Register once for the series or pick individual dates; Zoom sends your join link and a reminder before each session.
  • Recordings: sessions are not recorded by default — most of the time we're looking at real match data, which means real living people. If a walkthrough comes up that's worth keeping and nothing personal is on screen, we may record that stretch and share it.
  • Schedule: every Wednesday at 8:00 pm US Eastern. Upcoming dates are listed on the registration page.

Things we can dig into

There's no fixed curriculum — sessions go where the questions go. But if you'd like to see something specific, ask for it and we'll walk through it live. Any of these is fair game:

Ask about…Related lesson
Getting installed, logged in, and past a stuck setup Lesson 1
Running a gather — and what to do when one stalls Lesson 2
Reading your match list: cM ranges, anchors, filtering Lesson 3
Shared matches, trees, and segments — the second pass Lesson 4
Running your first cluster and making sense of the grid Lesson 5 & Lesson 6
Backing up your database, or moving it to a new computer Lesson 2
The Gold toolkit and the more advanced tools Lesson 7 & Lesson 8
Working an actual brick wall — yours or a sample one

Frequently asked

Do I need my data ready? No — you're welcome to just listen, and plenty of people do. If you want help with something specific, having the Client open makes it much easier.

Is it really free? Yes — office hours are included with every subscription, and anyone considering DNAGedcom is welcome to sit in.

What if I can't make it live? Come to a later one — sessions run every week and nothing is a prerequisite for anything else. The Academy lessons cover the fundamentals at your own pace, and you can always email a question in.

Can I get help with my specific research problem? Yes — that's the whole point. Adoptee and unknown-parentage searches welcome; that work is where DNAGedcom came from. You can also email support@dnagedcom.com anytime.

Will my match data be shown to everyone? Only if you choose to share your screen. We don't record by default, and we'll say so out loud before anyone shares.