DNA hope

[LizzieL]

I would add that the Thrulines / Common Ancestors function is based on the trees that your DNA matches have posted on Ancestry and a myriad of other Ancestry users who may or may not be related to you but have your ancestors in their trees. If they are wrong, then the Thrulines will be wrong.
Examples.
A number of trees think they have the father of one of my 3 x  great grandmothers. The man is in fact her  older brother, this means thrulines picks the wrong relationship between me and others who are descended from him or their common parents.
Many trees have my 2 x great grandfather married to the wrong Sarah (my 2 x great grandmother, his second wife), result being that all those descended from my 2 x g-gfather and his first wife, who should be my half third cousins or half 3C1R, don't show up a relationship at all.
I had a new match yesterday whose grandmother (according to her tree) was born in 1924 and gave birth to her father born in 1914. When I did a search on Ancestry for the actual birth year of the son, I found several more trees with the same error. Incidentally, the 1924 date is correct and the lady married in 1945 in Islington. The tree owner is my 3rd cousin twice removed, but Ancestry's algorithm obviously couldn't match a person born in 1914 with one of the same name in my tree born in 1947, so no Thruline match.

Remember, lots of people who have trees on Ancestry are only interested in making their tree as big as possible. Obviously they don't have the time to research properly thousands of people, particularly if these people are not directly related, just a distant connection to someone who married into their family generations back. But Ancestry has the perfect solution, it allows anyone to copy wholesale, great chunks of anyone else's public tree, whether it be correct or total garbage.

[Wulfsige]

Probably best if I paste a section of my Building a Family Tree file that I produced for my first Cousins

Thank you. This is massive and will keep me quiet for months! I have printed it out to keep in my "Young Family" box file, and I look forward to working through it and pursuing the links you suggest in it.

[Wulfsige]

Had to split up the above due to message length limitations

Hope this helps

Yes. Great. Many thanks - Ic țancie țe, as our ancestors might have put it.

[Ruskie]

Thank you very much for stickying this topic Sarah.
(Some good additional points by Lizzie too) 

[Mowsehowse]

 
Thanks.
Bookmarking this so I can find it to re-read several times, and maybe begin to understand a bit better!
 

[Biggles50]

DNA floodgates can open.

What I and no doubt many others have found is that as you work though the Common Ancestor DNA matches within Ancestry and build them diligently into your tree then the Shared Matches feature becomes very useful.

Once you have a proven link to a DNA match, when viewing the match in the DNA results the Shared tab then gives other DNA matches who you also share with each other.  From this you can presume that these shared matches are on the same branch and this can narrow down the work involved in linking to them and frequently you can add additional matches to your tree quite easily.

Using the colour coding feature can help in grouping the shared matches, btw there is a thread on colour coding which imo should also be a Sticky.  As you work through the DNA matches and use the colour coding then eventually you will find certain DNA matches will have multiple colour coded dots assigned to them, these are the ones where research is likely to yield the greatest break through as they are potentially the key to unlocking the door in the brick wall.

Of the filtering coding options available with one being different I reserve that for assigning to all linked DNA matches and that is the Star.  Not all DNA matches will be linked via Common Ancestor functional hints and so using the Star is a “catch all” where I can select it and view all my linked DNA matches which currently stands at 69 for me and 75 for my Wife’s tree (we are not competitive in the numbers game honest).

Do be patient, DNA matches are not necessarily a quick fix and it does take time to build knowledge and information but it is a very useful tool.

[Wulfsige]

Many thanks again. This forum is proving very helpful to me, a novice - though I started on the tree maybe 50 years ago by asking elderly and even old relatives for initial information and for old (incl 19th century) photos. Now I'm retired I can bend my mind to it in a more leisurely and sustained way. However, when I was working, I had an itinerant job for 25 years with mainly late afternoons and evenings working, so had day-times free for visits to CROs such as Durham, Cwmbrân (now Ebbw Vale), Taunton, and that place in Wiltshire (Chippenham, I seem to recall), plus time to visit towns and villages where the family had lived (Coupar Angus, Blaenavon, Pitcombe, Milton Clevedon) and sometimes photograph their old homes or churches or both.

I have printed out all this DNA advice and guidance. I have a subscription to MyHeritage and FindMyFamily, and what I think I'll do is abide with those till the year's subs run out, then transfer to Ancestry, where currently I am already a 'guest'.

[Biggles50]

Since my previous post there has been a development.

Quick run through.

I have a 364cM match plus a lot of others who link into a certain family who have been based in Bradford since the mid 1800’s.

I uploaded my info only websites and found three more Cousins who are directly related to the said family.

A My Heritage DNA test that I have taken gives me 112cM to a person who is a first Cousin of my 364cM match and the other is there 1/2 first Cousin at 87cM the third is a more distant Cousin. 

Linking these into my tree has been problematic and still a WIP.

So I have a DNA match with two first Cousins to each other and yet wide cM results between them and myself.

Many reasons why, the non linear distribution of DNA and including that given the location, endogomy may have taken place along a branch of the tree that I made of the family into my own tree.

Solving riddles is not always easy.

[Biggles50]

UPDATE.

A lack of support by my Paternal Cousins who have failed to follow up on their promises to take a DNA test resulted in my taking a yDNA test.

The result came back and including DNA matches who have the Surname of the Irish Family who are the centre of my ongoing research into my Ancestry test’s 364cM match.

Hence my family name is not our Biological name.

Be prepared for shocks in any DNA test that you or relatives, or friends may take.