Hello Plimmerian,
I have come to the conclusion that DNA test results might help illuminate one of the many dark recesses in my ancestral cupboard but more by luck than judgement. Like you Plimmerian, I have found it fairly straightforward to reach back to great-great-great-grandparents thanks to the online census resources. Also, there is more chance that the most recent pre-1841 church records have survived mice, damp and overenthusiastic vicars and are now being digitised. However, reaching back pre-1800 remains a much more difficult challenge.
And aye, there's the rub!
Nearly all autosomal DNA matches are fourth cousins or greater which, if you are as ancient as me, means people that lived in this pre-1800 period. So, unless you have a lot of these ancient connections already in your tree, then there is no match to be made with a name in your tree and so no family circle to draw.
I persuaded both a maternal and a paternal cousin to complete a test. This has enabled me to sort quite a lot of my "good" matches to one side of my tree or t'other. Quite honestly, most of the time all that means is that I now know in which half of the haystack to search for a needle.
Nevertheless, I have found (and met) two fourth cousins and am closing in on a couple more. I have also found many clusters of good matches with whom I probably share a common ancestor back in the (genealogical) dark ages in the 16th or 17th centuries.
I urge you to use the "notes" function for each match. Keep a note of the name of each "shared match" and soon you will start to see several results which at first glance were unrelated but in fact are connected to each other.
As ever, the ethnicity estimates are pleasant nonsense.
