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Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing / Re: Ethnicity - how far back does it go
« on: Yesterday at 09:18 »
Another way forward Hugh.
If you have around 25 matches that you can place in your tree, look at the shared matches of those matches. You can start grouping the shared matches to a particular family line as you know they are a match between you and your known match. Using the colour coding on Ancestry helps with that. If you have more than one known match to a particular line, say your paternal grandmother's family, you should notice some shared matches cropping up between you and all or more than one known match on that line. Look at the the shared matches of those shared matches and do the same. You should be able to attribute quite a lot of your higher matches to specific family lines.
It doesn't tell you who they are, but it is a start. From there, if you don't immediately recognise any of them from your own tree, it is a matter of picking the highest matches first (as they should be the easiest to resolve) and investigating them.
I don't contact many of my Ancestry matches as a matter of course, only if I think we might be able to help each other. Often, I can work them out through detective work. If they have a public tree and it is obvious they are in England or Wales you can start researching their own tree using the GRO index, FreeBMD and related Ancestry and other searches. You can often obtain mother's maiden names from birth records on the GRO index, but I fand the advanced search on FindMyPast much easier to work with in that regard, and it often has mother's maiden names which don't appear in the GRO index.
That information allows you to search for the marriage of the parents, as you have the mother and father's surnames. You can also search (again easiest on the FindMyPast advanced searches) for their other children, by father's surname and maiden name of the mother. I initially run those searches 9 years after the marriage, with a plus or minus 10 year window. That catches any child that might have been born just before a marriage, and those born up to 19 years later. You are effectively attempting to recreate their tree in the same way that you researched your own, all the while looking for possible avenues where your trees might converge and exploring them as fully as possible.
If your own tree is wide and deep, with brothers and sisters of each of your ancestors, their marriages and their children, the children's marriages and their own children etc., brought forward to the present as far as possible, it shouldn't be too difficult to discover the connection to many of your closest matches.
Yes, it can be hard and time consuming work, but DNA doesn't hand anything to you on a plate. It tells you that you have a relationship within a likely timeframe, and you have to do the research to discover the connection.
Also, the wider and deeper your tree, the more Thrulines hints you should find. Of course, they aren't necessarily correct as they rely on other user's trees to suggest connections, but they are another aid to your research. The more matches you can identify, the more you will find start to fit into place, and the more shared matches you should be able to allocate to specific ancestral lines.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating identifying the exact connection between you and every single match. I only tend to investigate the closer matches (by highest cM) and others that I think will help confirm or disprove my other research. But by doing that and as a result being able to allocate more shared matches to specific lines, you will discover the matches that you can't allocate, which can direct your further research into those areas.
I have tens of matches that I have been able to attribute to my maternal grandmother's line and beyond through sorting shared matches of matches for instance. I don't intend investigating the majority of them, as I don't "need" them to corroborate my research. I already have several confirmed matches on that line to evidence that. But by being able to allocate them I can remove them from the equation and identify other matches that I need to sort. And I can always come back to them if I discover a need to look further on that line.
Also, when looking at shared cM as a guide to which matches to prioritise, don't just go by the total cM. Prioritise those matches with larger segment lengths and fewer segments. A match of 60 cM over a single segment is likely to be easier to resolve than one of 60 cM over several smaller segments for instance.
If you have around 25 matches that you can place in your tree, look at the shared matches of those matches. You can start grouping the shared matches to a particular family line as you know they are a match between you and your known match. Using the colour coding on Ancestry helps with that. If you have more than one known match to a particular line, say your paternal grandmother's family, you should notice some shared matches cropping up between you and all or more than one known match on that line. Look at the the shared matches of those shared matches and do the same. You should be able to attribute quite a lot of your higher matches to specific family lines.
It doesn't tell you who they are, but it is a start. From there, if you don't immediately recognise any of them from your own tree, it is a matter of picking the highest matches first (as they should be the easiest to resolve) and investigating them.
I don't contact many of my Ancestry matches as a matter of course, only if I think we might be able to help each other. Often, I can work them out through detective work. If they have a public tree and it is obvious they are in England or Wales you can start researching their own tree using the GRO index, FreeBMD and related Ancestry and other searches. You can often obtain mother's maiden names from birth records on the GRO index, but I fand the advanced search on FindMyPast much easier to work with in that regard, and it often has mother's maiden names which don't appear in the GRO index.
That information allows you to search for the marriage of the parents, as you have the mother and father's surnames. You can also search (again easiest on the FindMyPast advanced searches) for their other children, by father's surname and maiden name of the mother. I initially run those searches 9 years after the marriage, with a plus or minus 10 year window. That catches any child that might have been born just before a marriage, and those born up to 19 years later. You are effectively attempting to recreate their tree in the same way that you researched your own, all the while looking for possible avenues where your trees might converge and exploring them as fully as possible.
If your own tree is wide and deep, with brothers and sisters of each of your ancestors, their marriages and their children, the children's marriages and their own children etc., brought forward to the present as far as possible, it shouldn't be too difficult to discover the connection to many of your closest matches.
Yes, it can be hard and time consuming work, but DNA doesn't hand anything to you on a plate. It tells you that you have a relationship within a likely timeframe, and you have to do the research to discover the connection.
Also, the wider and deeper your tree, the more Thrulines hints you should find. Of course, they aren't necessarily correct as they rely on other user's trees to suggest connections, but they are another aid to your research. The more matches you can identify, the more you will find start to fit into place, and the more shared matches you should be able to allocate to specific ancestral lines.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating identifying the exact connection between you and every single match. I only tend to investigate the closer matches (by highest cM) and others that I think will help confirm or disprove my other research. But by doing that and as a result being able to allocate more shared matches to specific lines, you will discover the matches that you can't allocate, which can direct your further research into those areas.
I have tens of matches that I have been able to attribute to my maternal grandmother's line and beyond through sorting shared matches of matches for instance. I don't intend investigating the majority of them, as I don't "need" them to corroborate my research. I already have several confirmed matches on that line to evidence that. But by being able to allocate them I can remove them from the equation and identify other matches that I need to sort. And I can always come back to them if I discover a need to look further on that line.
Also, when looking at shared cM as a guide to which matches to prioritise, don't just go by the total cM. Prioritise those matches with larger segment lengths and fewer segments. A match of 60 cM over a single segment is likely to be easier to resolve than one of 60 cM over several smaller segments for instance.