DNA results are back!

[Sinann]

Got my results today.
No surprises in the ethnicity result although you would be scratching you head in an amused way at being 76% Ireland, Scotland and Wales and 19% Great Britain. Scotland and Wales are part of Great Britain last I looked so I wonder how much overlap there is there.

As someone who doesn't have a tree on Ancestry the matches were interesting.
Most don't have trees.
The top two I found interesting purely from how matching works point of view.
My mother's sister moved to England, married and had a family there, so her children are my first cousins, her grand children my second cousins.
Lets say she had 3 children A 1st, B 1st, and C 1st, and their children A 2nd, B 2nd and C 2nd.
My result with these six people is
A 1st match, has no tree, A 2nd nothing
B 1st nothing, B 2nd nothing has a tree on Ancestry.
C 1st nothing, C 2nd match has a tree on Ancestry.

It will be interesting to see if I put a tree on if that result will change any.

[sugarfizzle]

You've lost me there, Sinann, but your results won't change if you put a tree up. 

The testing is done in the lab and the matching is done between different people in the database, without paying any regard to your tree.  Ancestry and other testing companies will only look at your respective trees after those first steps have been carried out.

Regards Margaret

[Janelle]

xinia,

.....
My advice to you is to sloooow down. Diving into the gene pool ...

I would suggest the following:

1. Load your test results to both gedmatch.com and ftdna.com. ...

2. With your Ancestry matches, I would recommend following a few of your closest matches and sweating them as hard as you can to see where that gets you. Use the gold star icon and the blue "new" buttons to help you filter matches ....

2.Use the "Add note" function. I record all my shared matches' names and the latest date I looked. This way you can click on the note icon to read what it says ....

3. I use Excel to record shared matches. This becomes very time-consuming but it reveals all sorts of matches that the Ancestry software doesn't.

I match to A and we share a match with X
I match to B and we share a match with Y
I match to C and we share a match to X and Y.

Therefore I deduce that X and Y are related and A is also related to Y and B to X and C is connected to A and B as well! ....
... when you've finished processing your 4th to 6th cousins, you will suddenly find 5th to 8th cousins connecting two of your connections hitherto unconnected ....

...

Ancestry inserts new results into your pages ....  These may result in new shared matches appearing in those individuals you have already examined ..... I can see no alternative to trawling back through all your results
....

Alternatively, you could open a bottle, of wine, light the fire and .....

Thankyou diplodocus,

Very sound advice !!

I was doing the spreadsheet messily before, but have got it sorted now.

We’re in Australia,
half Scots Irish,
quarter Catholic south Irish, quarter Devon Somerset.

Mass exodus of our families of Scots Irish and Somerset folks to America during late 1700’s to 1890’s so 95% of the matches are in USA.

Our 1st cousin on mum’s side has also done AncestryDNA. Brilliant benchmark for the Scots Irish half, yay.
If the match shares with that cousin it gets the star.

We didn’t realise that some matches are disguised from matching with this first cousin.
Only by using the spreadsheet and methodically flipping through the matches did we catch John Smith matching her and so drawing the 13 others he matched over to the starry side.

my Warrens and the rest of our cousindom remains unlit.

Do wish there was a brtter way than trawling the listing to find folks.

Control F?

The search function at the top is not useful - very few matches use a surname, I can’t make it find cryptic usernames or initials.

l have put the shared matches in strict order as they appeared in Ancestry, down the workbook and across the columns.

Colour coding for clusters within a family, is one way to clarify relationships, and to rationalise all the similar initials.

Salute,
Janelle

[diplodicus]

All that sounds very familiar Janelle,

I too colour-code but for likely ethnicity (red for Welsh, green for Irish, etc.) and have given each separate set of connections a letter. I've worked through the alphabet once and have now reached "ag"! By using letters, I can then use the Excel 'Filter' function to display just one set of connections. Doing this reveals all sorts of connections not made obvious by Ancestry.

I record the names of each shared match in the notes section to help me check whether or not any newly-arrived test results are also a match.

Also, in the notes section,  I record the letter  (A, B, etc.) for each match to speed up finding a specific set of "cousins".

It has been very useful for me to have a both a paternal and a maternal first cousin who have tested. It helps me place someone firmly in the right half of my tree.

It is still a little frustrating that I have to regularly visit every 4-6th cousin since Ancestry doesn't reset them to "new" (blue dot against the match) when a new arrival matches to them.

If all this sounds time-consuming, it is!!!

[Janelle]

Yup, diplodocus,

I only have to work thru potentially half of our 266 matches.
And with 3 pairs of kissing cousins at 3rd or 4th great grandparents my pedigree is concentrated to a limited number of interconnected surnames, so I have a column for the known surname of the cluster, and can filter in a similar way. Yay

Early days, work in progress,

Janelle

[Aldon Grisdale]

It was through Ancestry. The 1% Scandinavian was a shock because my surname is Grisdale which is from Mungrisdale, Matterdale and this is Viking for pig valley!

Hi paulsue38

Tested BigY with FTDNA and whole genome with Dante, upload Yfull. No other Grisdales on FTDNA and not tested Ancestry. Be interested to know who you match with on ancestry. My confirmed haplogroup is I-BY34708, which is of Scandinavian origin.