Connecting Your DNA Matches Pt.2: The Clues

I already wrote about the visual tool offered by Bonnie at DNA RootSearch in an earlier blog post Connecting Your DNA Matches but I have more to say.

When I was looking at my results I realized I was getting clues that aren’t as easy to see on your Ancestry matches pages. These clues were grouping my matches in a way that I don’t think I would have easily noticed.

Let me explain.

I was reviewing a match of my mother’s at Ancestry and then looked for the same person on the graphic created by DNA RootSearch. Well, that’s when I had to write to Bonnie to get an understanding of what I was seeing. I noticed that there were people in the cluster created by DNA RootSearch that I was not seeing when looking at my Ancestry matches.

 

 

 

 

Bonnie explained to me that Ancestry will not show you Shared Matches with people who fall under 20 cM . As in the case above, none of these matches appear when I click on Shared Matches with Catherine, since they are all matches that fall UNDER 20 cM. But when I look at each of the people individual they all have Catherine as a shared match. Now if I was super observant and did a better job of tracking each and every person on the match list I likely could do this myself, but this would take more time than I have.

There is no way confirm on Ancestry that these people all connect with each other without asking them. The best way to confirm this cluster of matches is to have them upload to Gedmatch or FTDNA and then check the Chromosome browser to see if they match each other on the same segment. We all know how tricky it would be to get each of them to 1) respond to my message and 2) to upload to another site.

At this point I can see that this is a very interesting cluster that I would not have picked up on if it had not been for the graphic provided for by DNA RootSearch. It is a clue, not an answer, not a solution, but a breadcrumb trail that may be worth pursuing.