I have a confirmed 7th cousin through Ancestry and quite a few 5th and 6th cousins. I have done a lot of research over the years and it is paying off with the matches. My tree isn’t on Ancestry which means I check each match with name searches and narrow it down that way, it’s slow but I am enjoying checking through. I have managed to confirm my paternal line which had been a dead end for a long time due to an illegitimate birth in 1764. I now know who the father was.
All I can say, is it’s not for the faint hearted if you want to check the matches. So far, I have managed to confirm that my research is all good.
I seem to have more than my fair share of matched trees belonging to Americans which all go back to very early immigrants

. Those matches will have to remain unconfirmed as I don’t relish checking hundreds of unconfirmed matches/trees.
Another question with my husband’s line has been answered too. He’d done a YDNA test 8 years ago to help someone else to confirm their paternal line… it’s an unusual Haplogroup (C) and in 8 years we have only had 5 matches, he is also part of a named group on familytreedna. Some of the other members of this named group have a different Haplogroup which we had assumed meant a different family altogether BUT they are coming up as matches on ANCESTRY after he did an Ancestry test ! So somewhere there has been a NPE in one of the trees, our line is confirmed to at least 1702 in Ireland but we know the family were from England prior to that… I have been searching for years to confirm where in England with no luck but with the Ancestry match it appears the family were from the Bristol area.
I had an open mind to what I might find with the test results as we weren’t trying to prove or disprove anything but I am more than pleased with what I have found so far.
One can of worms could be the 1-2nd cousin who appears to be looking for a father

. As I know all my cousins… I wonder who might be the culprit
