Genealogy Chat

According to the latest Lost Cousins Newsletter, Ancestry are going to stop showing matches below 8cM. There are workarounds but you need to take action quickly if you want to still see those matches.

See the newsletter for what to do:
https://www.lostcousins.com/newsletters2/jul20news.htm#Disappearing

Thanks for that Kense.

Most of my really low matches have no trees and no shared matches are shown. Of those that do have trees they are too small or, if, bigger, tend to be American with no clues as their original English family.

I have also been to a series of talks given by well known experts who dismiss these low figures as being irrelevant and too far back to mean anything. They seem not to trust anything below around 25cms, even if there is a full tree.

I found that I had twelve 8 cM matches and three 6 cM matches that had trees with a common ancestor.

When I look at my results using GEDMatch, I usually set the match limit to at least 10 cM.

It will be interesting to see whether Ancestry's new matching makes much difference.

https://www.ancestrycdn.com/support/us/2020/07/2020whitepaper.pdf

I wonder what the point of having a DNA test is if you don't have a tree. There's no way you can check on anything. I know you can send messages to ask to see a tree and sometimes - rarely in my case - you'll get a reply. There's no point to this, though, if your match doesn't have a tree at all.

Annie

Somehow Ancestry may work out common ancestors even though the tree you are matched with does not include that ancestor. Presumably they work it out from third party trees that share your and their ancestors.

For example it gives me a match with a public tree that has five people all of whom appear as private and several others with just a few people in them. You can also get common ancestors with private trees.

It seems that the change has been put back to late August.

Today any Cm matches below 10cM have a decimel point added eg 9.9 etc and the site keeps "overloading" :-(