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