An autosomal DNA-tested descendant of a person matches some people who an ancestor would have matched if the ancestor had tested. We can calculate a precise theoretical percent of the ancestor’s matches who would match the descendant. For example, a child matches about 50% of the people her father would have matched if her father had tested.

If multiple descendants of an ancestor had autosomal DNA-tested, they together match a higher percentage of the ancestor’s potential matches. We can calculate this percentage. For example, five children of she same parent would match about 96.875% of the people who would match that parent if the parent had tested.

Paul Woodbury coined the term “coverage” for this calculated percent and developed formulae for doing the calculation in parent-child scenarios. His formulae do not easily extend to a generalized additive way of recursively calculating coverage that allows for automation of coverage calculation for

any given combination of descendants.

This paper presents a generalized additive recursive method that allows for automated calculation of autosomal DNA match coverage of an ancestor. This paper then provides a visionary glimpse of a related tool to automatically calculate the coverage of a specific relative from the DNA of other family members towards identification of the remains of a family member lost in a prior conflict.

I intend this presentation of the method to allow anyone to implement the pseudo code in actual code. Developers can implement this conceptual version in a great many different ways. The first developer to implement it is David Stumpf who has implemented it as a feature in his Graphs for Genealogists software (https://www.wai.md/gfg).

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