AncestryDNA’s new BETA

I have recently received my DNA match results and have been reading on here about 'Trulines', but have to admit that I am no wiser as to how use it. Please can someone offer some advice? Many thanks.

 

Welcome to this forum JudithB.

Assuming you have a tree on Ancestry (at least 3-4 generations deep) and have linked it to your DNA results, you should see a ThruLines panel on the right hand side of your DNA dashboard (the screen you get when you click on DNA in Ancestry's top menu). However, this may take a few days to come through after you link your tree, so maybe you can't yet see this?

Assuming you can see the ThruLines panel, click on the question mark icon at the top right for answers to FAQs. If you click on 'Explore ThruLines' you get an array of tiles of your ancestors from parents to 5x great-grandparents. Some of these will be labelled 'potential ancestors' which aren't in your tree but have been gathered from other people's trees (not just those of your DNA matches). Clicking on any of the ancestor tiles shows you (in family tree format) Ancestry's suggestions of which of your DNA matches might be descended from the same common ancestor. Note they are just suggestions, based on other Ancestry trees, which may well be wrong, so need to be checked by looking at the relevant trees and checking with other records (BMD etc) as appropriate.

Another way of looking at ThruLines which I've found useful is to activate the 'New and Improved DNA Matches' Beta - from Ancestry Lab in the Extras menu. With this activated, you get a list of DNA matches which you can filter on 'Common Ancestor' and click through to see how a particular DNA match may link to you (again you need to check for accuracy as the information is only as good as people's trees!). Once in this 'tree' view you get an option to 'View ThruLines' to see who else may be linked through the same common ancestor.

ThruLines really just brings together Ancestry's 'hints' in an easy-to-read format, as well as pointing to possible connections in private trees as well as public ones. Providing you don't treat the results as 'true' without checking, it can be a very useful tool - certainly quicker than wading through thousands of hints and trees yourself.

Good luck!

 

I agree. I have a few instances where the relationship shown by ThruLines was flawed, but further investigation showed a different relationship. I have several where I am related on more than one line.

 

I hadn't done this for a while, but seeing your post I decided to add a comment to a wrong ancestor in a cousin's tree, and it worked fine.

 

Thank you Helen.
I have already followed what you suggested up to clicking on the question mark and reading most of the FAQs, but do not see an 'Explore ThruLines'.

I have already activated the 'New and Improved DNA Matches' Beta - from Ancestry Lab in the Extras menu. I have looked at DNA matches and looked at the tree view, but have not seen 'View ThruLines'. I am very new to all this and find difficulty understanding it all, even after reading explanations. I don't like to give up though.

Regards, Judith

 

The 'Explore ThruLines' green button should appear at the bottom of the ThruLines panel, if it's more than about 4 days since you linked your tree to your DNA results. As Katie Bee found (see post #177) the linked tree (public or private) has to contain the real names of both yourself and your parents for it to work. As you know, Ancestry automatically hides the identities of living people, but they need to be in your linked tree for ThruLines to work.

 

Hi
There is no green button, but it is probably because my parents names are not on my tree then. As my mother is still alive I haven't put them on.
Thank you for your help.

 

Can you still see the 'View Comments' option in the Tools menu?

 

Yes, that will be the reason. Ancestry does take care to hide the identity of any living person in the ThruLines trees, so no-one will see your mother's details - she will just appear to others as 'Private', and you will appear with your initals and username (with a photo if you have uploaded one!).

 

Thank you Helen. I will name them and try again when I have a quiet hour or so.

 

Adding a comment to a tree is working fine for me, but something that isn't working properly at present is the Common Ancestors in the 'New and Improved DNA Matches' - I am no longer seeing common ancestors with the distant cousin matches. Is it just me or a general problem?

(I am using the .co.uk site which works a bit differently from the .com site in some places.)

 

Same here! It's only showing me the first 20 matches (going down to 13 cM), whereas I had 46 before. I had previously assigned these 46 to colour-coded groups, and if I select each group I see all the matches in that group, however distant (but then there are <20 per group).

 

Yes - it seems to be a general issue. Scrolling works in multiples of 20 in this report and it doesn’t get past the first 20.

 

I looked at my common ancestors last week and had 13 close and 7 distant which I now realise adds up to 20.
So it was only giving me 20 last week. I had not looked at it before.
My list only goes down to 15cM shared, so after reading the above, I am sure that I would have had more matches if I had looked earlier.

 

Yes, I've counted now and I'm only getting the first 20 matches too, which gets me as far as a 23 cM match (22cM for my sister).

I'm getting the rotating thing at the bottom of the screen briefly, but whereas before more common ancestor matches would then appear (several times over) now nothing further happens.