new beta on ancestry dna results

[MIG79]

I'm going to swim against the tide here and say I'm finding these "New Products" quite useful.
I actually watched the Crista Cowan (Barefoot Genealogist) video presentation, all 56 minutes.
I thought that was very informative..

So I'm going to grab my tin hat and go and watch the football!

[Rezillo]

I've found the Thru Lines of very little help but otherwise, it's been fine for me.

Common ancestors has been incredibly useful. I've got about 10% wrong on my tree and 20% or so on my partner's. That increase for the latter is entirely down to one family with both a lot of DNA-linked descendants and a lot of copied wrong links. Remove people connected to that one family from the results and it's down to about 10%.

I guess that if someone's tree has several of these families, then their error rate will be a lot higher but that is more a case of bad luck rather than a fault of the system.

For me, I have a large number of entirely new, verifiable links, often at cousin levels I would never have bothered with looking at before. I would not want to go back to the old system at all. I'd still be better off if half the matches were wrong!

[familydar]

For my higher matches I'd already identified the common ancestors and made a note against the match, so it was just a case of giving them a group - I like groups, more user-friendly than the chrome add-on I was using previously.

Now I'm working through the suggested common ancestors for my lower ranked matches and whilst one or two have come good, a large number of them seem to depend on "tree-hopping" and these are iffy at best.  The usual complaint of someone with approximately the right name born 150 years earlier or later and on a different continent.

Jane :-)

[Pheno]

What triggers them to disappear? I've only got two left. I only looked at all of them, I didn't add them to anything.
Easy come easy go, they were fun while I had them.

I was going to ask how to deleter/ignore them like you can Ancestry Hints (which is what I end up doing most of the time) but can't find that option with Thrulines.

Maybe mine will also just disappear at some point.

Pheno

[Sinann]

What triggers them to disappear? I've only got two left. I only looked at all of them, I didn't add them to anything.
Easy come easy go, they were fun while I had them.

I was going to ask how to deleter/ignore them like you can Ancestry Hints (which is what I end up doing most of the time) but can't find that option with Thrulines.

Maybe mine will also just disappear at some point.

Pheno

Maybe it's different if you have a sub, but I would just not click on it.

[sugarfizzle]

I have mixed opinions about Thrulines, mainly negative, but New and Improved DNA matches I do like. Abilities to tag and sort matches in up to 24 different groups/colours is what a lot of people have been asking for for a long time.

Certainly room for improvement but better than just having one favourite yellow star.

Regards Margaret

[Phil Goater]

Initially I was impressed as Thrulines appeared to break down a brick wall but having played with it for a bit I’m not so sure. I found that they’d established a DNA distant cousin through my step great grandmother’s line. This didn’t compare to the number of matches through my great grandad’s first wife and somehow I doubt the veracity of their find. It’s also suggested, without any DNA back up, an identity for a 4x great grandfather which I’m confident is a spurious connection on somebody else’s tree. Not as helpful as I first thought and to be treated with caution! It does however suggest lines of enquiry.
Phil

[Gadget]

For my higher matches I'd already identified the common ancestors and made a note against the match, so it was just a case of giving them a group - I like groups, more user-friendly than the chrome add-on I was using previously.

Now I'm working through the suggested common ancestors for my lower ranked matches and whilst one or two have come good, a large number of them seem to depend on "tree-hopping" and these are iffy at best.  The usual complaint of someone with approximately the right name born 150 years earlier or later and on a different continent.

Jane :-)

The colour coding is very useful but I'm yet to find a way of adding notes unless I disable and go back to the standard version.  Have I missed an option?

[familydar]

No Gadget, I've found that to be a pain too, although rather than toggle the new features on and off I've found that if you click the username from within whichever new page you're on, you can then edit the notes field.  But the pretty colour coded groups aren't visible.  I'm making a lot of use of notepad (other text editors are available  ) so I can formulate what I want to write then cut and paste.

Perhaps once it passes from beta to live it will become more integrated.

Jane :-)