What next after Ancestry?

I had a look at Auto Clusters for my account and for a relative. I found some new information on both.

I can see where a few matches sit in my family tree because they cluster with a match I know.

I have some matches on different lines who match each other independently and it was good for sorting them out. Also for identifying potential IBS matches forming a tight square cluster. But most of the clusters involve only three or four matches and no other clues.

Worth a look, but I don’t think it’s worth paying any extra for it.

 

Apologies for my ignorance, but what is an IBS match?

 

Sorry - I should have said a false positive.

 

That is quite pretty. And very top heavy!

Mine gave me 28 groups, but none with any DNA tests that I actually have linked in my head (I honestly think mine is made up of my Ashkenazi Jewish relatives).

 

Not at this point in time - if one of the groups had included one of the small number of people that I knew where they were related, I could see it’s possible applications (close to the ThruLines feature on Ancestry). For me it just produced a pretty picture and not a lot of actual useful information.

 

Tim, mine looks much like yours. I have 14 names in it, not one of which I recognize. I have 26 clusters altogether, most of which have 3 or 4 names. The second one has 12; I recognize none of those names either. The third has 9 and I know some of them are Joyce connected. It is also completely filled in, which most of the others are not. I have not yet figured out whether it is of any use.

 

Ditto. I assume it only applies if you have a tree at MyHeritage.

 

You can use the 'Chromosome Browser' tool at MyHeritage to identify any shared DNA segments with people in a cluster. You can compare up to 7 people at a time and see where the matches are. However, I'm not sure how reliable it is in confirming a common ancestor. I have found a few very short shared segments in my clusters, but this may well just be due to the 'common population' matches that Peter has mentioned before, and which Ancestry try to remove with their algorithm (so the cM values are always lower at Ancestry than MyHeritage or GEDmatch).

And of course even if the shared segments suggest a common ancestor, it doesn't tell you who it might be!

 

I had an Autocluster report at MyHeritage and it helped me decide which of my grandparent lines several people belonged to. It did in few minutes what would have taken me several hours to do. I noticed that the groups were people who shared at least 30 cM with me and 10 cM with each other. I have seen other people who had different figures quoted in their reports, 30/15 or 25/15. I would be interested in hearing what figures people in this group were quoted in their reports and possible reasons for the choice.

 

My report quotes 25/20 but my husband's is 25/10. Not sure why different threshold values are used. It just says:
'These thresholds were automatically selected and adjusted by our algorithms for your analysis, in order to yield the best clusters for your specific DNA kit.'

 

I have been reading this thread and finding it interesting. My dad and I tested with Ancestry. Having found some new cousins and solved one mystery using my results, it was a bit disappointing that his results have only confirmed my matches and found a few more descendants of the same common ancestors that I had already confirmed. That said, I have, between us, links to descendants from most of my of my main branches. This would appear to confirm my paper research.
Something interesting might pop up at any time though.
I tried Gedmatch and found it too fiddly and unproductive so gave up on it. My Heritage linked me to a known contact, useful as it verified my research but I don't intend to put a tree on there and now that they have asked for £29 to provide my Dad's ethnicity I doubt I will bother with them anymore at all. (I know I shouldn't want something for nothing but there are limits on what can be spent on FH).
I was wondering whether other people add their new found cousins to their tree? After verifying them of course.
Some time ago I pruned my tree as I despaired of finding out about all these people and wanted to concentrate on what I had, rather than the descendants of every line. Now i think that the bigger the tree the more likely I am to recognise family names which are not my ancestors but may be descended from them. I certainly don't want to be a name collector but wonder what others do.