Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Happy to Have More AncestryDNA Hints

I last wrote about my AncestryDNA matches in Happy to Finally Have Some AncestryDNA Hints on 13 February 2013.  I'm happy to report that I have many more Autosomal DNA matches now that show up as 5th to 8th cousins.

Back in February, I had four matches with Hints (the green leaves) on my AncestryDNA Results list.  

Now I have 34 matches with Hints, which probably reflects a significant increase in AncestryDNA testers, or Ancestry Member Tree creators.  Here is what the first several screens on my AncestryDNA "Hints" matches look like (three screens shown)





So I have one match with a near-certain 4th cousin (96% confidence) and 33 matches with 5th to 8th cousins (moderate to very low confidence).

Picking one of the matches down the list a bit, I clicked on the green "Review Match" button and saw the "Shared Surnames" list and pedigree chart for that particular matching person (who is Benjamin Wing (1698-1776):


The "Shared Surname" list shows a number of colonial Massachusetts and Rhode Island family surnames, so I clicked on the green "Show details" link to see the information for the Shared Ancestor Hint:


This shows that I am a 7th Cousin of the "Matching Person" - we both have Benjamin Wing and Content Tucker as our 6th great-grandparents.  

I've reviewed almost all of the matches with Hints now, and there are matching persons who are all 6th to 8th cousins, with the exception of the first match, which is a 3rd cousin.  

I keep hoping that closer cousins than 6th to 8th cousins will take the AncestryDNA autosomal DNA test and we can make contact.  I have corresponded with the 3rd cousin already, but have not corresponded with any of the others.  Almost all of them are descended from the colonial New England part of my ancestry.  

One of the matches is to Thomas Dill (1682-1718), which adds more evidence that my Elizabeth Dill (1791-1869) is a descendant of that Thomas Dill.  I really need a match with a descendant of Thomas Dill (1755-1830) or his wife Hannah Horton (1761-1797) to really have convincing evidence.

Two of the matches are to Matthias Trimmer (1722-1793) of New Jersey, which provides evidence that my line back to Matthias Trimmer is correct.  I have had doubts about some of the connecting ancestors due to lack of records.  However, it is not convincing to me yet - I could be descended from Matthias Trimmer but not have found the connecting families.

These Hints based on finding common autosomal DNA segments and tree matches in two family trees is a great way to highlight close and distant cousins (up to 8th cousins).  However, they don't show possible tree matches to persons who are not in my tree or the other person's tree.  I have hundreds of matches of that nature, and need to sort through them to find likely matches based on surnames and locality.  Even that won't find help for me in most cases, since my tree information is often more extensive than the matching persons.  

One thing that many AncestryDNA testers desire is to be able to see the matching segments on the 46 chromosomes - that would help us determine which segments of the DNA match other persons - a researcher can then catalogue the segments on each chromosome and build a genetic genealogy pedigree chart.  FamilyTreeDNA and 23andMe show these types of matching chromosome segment charts, but AncestryDNA does not.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/10/happy-to-have-more-ancestrydna-hints.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When is Ancestry going to roll out the Real DNA results for the rest of us peons and not you "celebrities"