Hi all.
Just curious if anyone else has experience this issue and might know the cause of it.
My aunt and myself have tested on ancestry DNA. I can confirm that we are directly related and we share the expected common matches!
However whenever I check our shared matches we haven't had any new ones for months and months. As she connects with half my DNA I find this hard to believe that we are not having any more shared matches.
Any ideas?
It's not unusual. Most of your new matches will be smaller matches. For them to be shared matches for both of you, the match will have to match you both above 20cM. So if a new match appears that matches both of you, and it matches you both at 19cM (or 19.5-19.9 rounded up to 20), you won't see it as a shared match.
However, if it matches you at 21cM, and your aunt at 18cM, when you look at your shared matches, that person will NOT show as a shared match between you and your aunt (or vice versa). But if you look at that match on your aunt's matches,
YOU will show as a shared match. Confusing isn't it
.
Because of the rather random nature of shared matches, and also the Ancestry Timber algorithm that randomly reduces the size of matches differently between relatives (even if it is exactly the same segment(s)), that is why it is a good idea to share your DNA matches with other researchers in your family or ask aunts/uncles/cousins to share to avoid this limitation.
