AncestryDNA’s new BETA

Interesting but not something I have observed, as far as I could tell it only related information to the actual linked Tree, although there were full versions for both.

My original linkage for my wife's Tree was always a 'direct ancestor & spouses' public Tree, whilst my own was to a full public Tree. Then more or less on a whim I produced a cut down Tree of my own and changed the linkage. This happened well before the arrival of ThruLines and so I judged TL on the same basis for both, but as I was again researching my wife's Tree, that received most of my attention.

Last week I decided to change the linkage for both Trees to their full public versions and deleted both cut down Trees. Nothing changed for a few days but then TL disappeared as reported. Since its return (today) I have only checked my own TL and believe it has turned up some new findings which I shall explore further. Then I will turn my attention to my wife's Tree.

 

Clearly ThruLines does not handle multiple marriages well.

I find that one of my ancestors (Jane) appears twice on my ThruLines screen, and both her husbands are there (in solid boxes). Her first husband is my ancestor, and the 2nd husband is in my tree as a later spouse. I have 8 DNA matches descended from Jane - one from her 1st husband, 4 from her 2nd husband and 3 from an illegitimate child she had (father unknown) several years after her 2nd husband died. The 1st husband is correctly shown as an ancestor of the singleton (whom I'd already been in touch with pre-ThruLines and verified the connection). The 2nd husband is wrongly shown as an ancestor of all 8.

If I detach the 2nd husband, I wonder if I would 'lose' the 7 half-cousins currently showing? I have verified the last 3, but the 4 from the 2nd husband are still to be followed up. They should still appear with Jane as the common ancestor, but given the other glitches with the system I'm not so sure.

 

Just looked at my ThruLines and I find my two missing 2x great grandparents have miraculously reappeared! Wonder how long they'll stick around, or if someone else will go missing next... I still have lots of strange 'potential ancestors' - will need to investigate whether any of them lead anywhere.

 

Perhaps it’s someone else’s tree who has the second husband incorrectly in as a father to the wrong children, and that’s leading to an incorrect entry in your ThruLines?

I went and checked my most notorious ancestor who had two wives (notorious because he married the second wife after they’d had about 8 children), and he appears fine, his second wife doesn’t appear on my list of ancestors, and even a few of the DNA links that I have through his second wife’s children (half aunts) are there and correctly labelled - those with a tree able to be extrapolated anyway. All the men who married twice on that particular branch (my father’s) are entered correctly with the correct spouse and no sign of the incorrect spouse.

Though I’ve just noticed the worst, and most pervasive of the incorrect ancestors on Ancestry trees has appeared in my father’s ThruLines... makes me mad. So difficult for a 70-odd year old man to have been listed on a death certificate as a 17mth old baby, though now they’ve started altering the incorrect parents of my ancestor to match his actual age - someone else has then added a “DNA verified” picture to that particular set of incorrect ancestors, and is supposedly related to me.

I also checked the ThruLines entry for the other possible error - which is my illegitimate great-grandfather who often put his step father on official documents, but other than adding a completely incorrect father and a pair of grandparents for him, the rest of the information seems to be there correctly.

 

Possibly. However, looking at the other trees mentioned by ThruLines, none of them have the 2nd husband in their trees at all. The ones descended from Jane's illegitimate child just have Jane and 'unknown father' (as I do), the others don't have him or Jane in their tree (stopping at the generation below). But Ancestry is probably using information from other trees that are not shown in my ThruLines relationships. Looking at the 'hints' for Jane and her 2nd husband, there are several public trees showing him as the father of more children than he had with Jane (these of course don't record his death 7 years before the last child was born!)

 

I have had great success with Ancestry's new Beta for identifying Common Ancestors with DNA matches.

However, I have found that sometimes it will show two males as the common ancestor - which initially had me confused. I eventually worked out that it was showing that the link was through another wife.

Here's an example:

Ancestry Common Ancestors - Duncan McIntyre and Archibald McIntyre
Duncan is Archibald's son
Duncan had three wives
My wife is descended from Duncan's first wife and the DNA match is descended from Duncan's second wife

Hope this helps others.

 

I wouldn't be sure either! The spouse I detached from my ancestor was pretty low risk since I don't have any ThruLines dependent on her, plus she and my ancestor didn't formally marry so I didn't even have to delete any marriage details to detach her. Overall she seemed like an ideal person to experiment with.

 

One of mine has come back too, along with all his ancestors. Yippee!

And one of my replaced ancestors has also returned, albeit still with the wrong spouse/partner.

 

I put my tree up and linked it to my DNA results on Wednesday and no access to ThruLines has appeared yet.
Maybe tomorrow.

 

It will come Katie believe me.

 

Thanks Bob.

It has also given me time to correct my marriage addresses!
I had taken note that Ancestry was particular about addresses, so I had gone through all my births and deaths and put those in the correct format.
I forgot about marriages until I looked on the map facility and looked at one of my ancesters who was born and died in Yorkshire, but married in Louisiana, USA!
My tree had not been changed, but the details in the profile was incorrect on the map function.
They had married in Barton St Mary, and that was all that my record recorded, so Ancestry decided that was 'St Mary, Louisiana, USA'.
It did not bother about the Barton bit.
So I have been busy updating my tree!

 

I have been focusing on Common Ancestors in the DNA Matches too since ThruLines started to settle down. I hear that the numbers of matches with common ancestors ranges from very few for some people to many hundreds for some American testers. It’s between 30 and 100 for the people I have been comparing notes with here in the UK. Just wondering if anyone is seeing significantly more than that?

 

I have 41 listed Common Ancestors, 14 of which are listed as 4th. Nine of those have so far been identified as either my mother's side or my paternal grandmother. still no joy regarding my unknown grandfather.

 

Thank you - that is interesting. An unknown grandparent must limit the potential.

I have 58 suggested matches under common ancestors now and 53 of those seem to be accurate. Most of them, around 40, are probably in the United States. There are about 20 “new” cousins at about fourth and fifth cousin range. I’m sure I wouldn’t have found most of them without this Beta.

I tried to allocate the matches to the 16 sets of 3x great grandparents. I have clear matches for only five of those couples (at fourth cousin or further) together with four closer cousins. I can prove some other lines through matches on Ancestry but those matches don’t have searchable trees so they don’t show up here.

 

Of the DNA tests with the most relevance to your question (that of my father; my mother and my paternal grandmother), they have 50 (father), 52 (PG) and 12 (mother). My father and grandmother's results include possible 2nd and 3rd cousins as well as "4th" and "distant".

The majority of the results from my father and PG are from our Dutch Ashkenazi Jewish side (which involves pedigree collapse) and there is a LOT of documented emigration, including a number of proven lines to Canada and the US. Both my father and PG had in the region of 30 "Shared Ancestry Hints" on the old form.
For example my father has 24 common ancestors hints from his paternal line, but 26 from his maternal line and 18 of those from the proven Ashkenazi Line from both sides of the pedigree collapse.

My mother's ancestry is purely British/Welsh (she was a 10 pound Pom), and she only had 6 Shared Ancestor hints, so I wasn't expecting much more than that. Of the 12 common ancestors, only one is iffy, since it attaches me to an ancestor who apparently only lived in the US, so it's probably a step too low. However, saying that, I think it's correct, because not only do they share DNA with my mother, but also one of her cousins who I have been in previous contact with (and just had her DNA results come in) from the side that Ancestry is suggesting, so it leans towards the veracity of the results.

The most value I find from these Common Ancestor hints is then being able to then look at the shared matches and I now colour code them, and beyond those who give me "Common Ancestors" which don't include some of the closer DNA matches as they don't have trees, up to twice as many results for that family group (so far that is!).

 

I think this is an important point. Most of my matches marked “Common ancestor” are just too distant to generate many shared matches. I can see the DNA information for a second cousin once removed who is one generation “earlier” than me and his shared matches are very informative. Most of our matches are the descendants of emigrants and most of the emigrations were at least four or five generations before me.

 

I notice that there are now far more shared matches - that should be really useful.

 

Yes, I've noticed that. I'm getting at least twice as many as under the old system.

 

Here are my stats: 14 common ancestors & 183 4th cousins or nearer.
My wife is a lot better: 55 common ancestors & 333 4th cousins or nearer.

 

All of my paternal relatives emigrated to Australia between 1840 and 1906 (my mother, as I mentioned was a 10 pound Pom with her parents). Some of them had other family members who emigrated to the USA and Canada, either from the UK, or from Australia. My Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors were probably moved the most - most of the lines take them back to Germany and the Czech Republic before Amsterdam, England and finally Australia (and all prior to 1856).

I often think that those linked back on "higher" links are more useful - as it can confirm research you have done already and for a lot of my closer relatives, I already know a lot about them!