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I have explained about a 364cM match here, well they are not the only mystery.

A year ago a 240 cM match showed up in my match list, he is still the second highest.

His tree consisted of him and his Dad who had the forename Stanley, so not a lot to go on.

After clicking on Shared Match’s I was presented with 29 people, of whom 15 have Italian surnames.

Looking through my other DNA matches there is easily 100 others who also have Italian surnames so there is a clue there, I think!

I built a standalone tree and very soon got back to Italy and to an area South East of Rome.  The tree was expanded and a number of other DNA match’s were incorporated into the tree.

Now why the Italian connect spiked my interest was that even though we love pizza, pasta, Barollo, Opera, Renaissence Art (Honeymooned in Florence) and all things Italian I have a hole in my Family Tree. 

An unknown Great Great Grandfather.

If I fit a certain person in the 240 cM tree as my own Great Great Grandfather then the relationships with the 249cM and other match’s fit.

Ancestry’s Ethnicity has my Parental side mainly Irish and a good chunk of Italian, so that also fits.  OK its an estimate we will not get to excited about that but its another piece in the puzzle.

So meet my Great Great Grandfather, a travelling Italian Musician who ended up in Bardford living on the same street as what looks like most of his Bandmates.

It is quite sometime ago now since my Wife and I took Ancestry’s DNA test, and as most find out you stumble around in the dark until you learn how it all works at least enough to make use of the results.

My Wife’s highest cM match initially was 100cM and mine 144cM.

The what is now the age old problems of a match with no trees, no link, a user name that gives no clue as to the ID of the match did cause frustration but once we learned how to use the available Filters we could omit these from the results displayed.

What did make a difference in successfully adding a match to our trees was the Common Ancestor feature.  First time around I was a bit sceptical as the suggested pathways seemed to be cobbled together from various Ancestry Trees, but careful working person by person in a logical manner resulted in getting the suggested pathway to the match incorporated into our trees.  Often there were errors in particular missing generations but these were overcome.

As each match is incorporated into our trees we now assign the Star to each one and additionally there are two Custom Groups that I created, mPaternal and Maternal and the appropriate Group is then given to the match.  As of today My Wife has 85* and I have 81* and out of these then about 90% are through using the Common Ancestor suggestions.  Our match’s that are now in our trees range from 240cM to 6cM with one only taking two minutes to add as their Brother was already in my tree.

So all in all a pretty good feature that has proved invaluable for us.

As you might guess there is a But coming, last night I did my weekly check to see if there was any new Common Ancestor hints and there were two for me one 11cM and one 14cM so both way back to c1750.  The 11cM was added person by person and the end results was a 5C1R.

The 14cM was nothing like the suggestion and after an hour’s work I got there but there is severe doubt over its accuracy so its flagged up in the assignable Note against the match to recheck in a couple of days.

How successful have you been with using the Common Ancestor hints?

Tried to search GRO and found the Birth records for 1935 to 1983 do not seem available to search.

Anyone know why?

I had a splash banner show up this morning advising that a DNA update was coming soon.

8 new ethnicity regions.

The mind boggles at what there could possibly be different from the many permutations that there have been since we had our DNA tested.