Wednesday, November 19, 2014

First Look at Improved AncestryDNA Matches

I wrote Waiting for the AncestryDNA Improvements yesterday knowing that they were coming soon - and they appear to be here.  Besides a reduced number of matches, there is one added feature.  I will try to compare these new results with the previous results.

1)  Here is my AncestryDNA home screen:



The Ethnicity Estimate is the same.

The DNA Matches area looks different.  There are head shots of 8 of my matches.  There are "Quick Links" for the 49 "Shared ancestry hints," for "Starred matches," and for "58 4th Cousins or closer."

2)  The major addition to this page is the "DNA Circles" portion.  The text for that says:

"DNA Circles are the latest way to discover who you're related to—even if you aren't DNA matches. Each DNA Circle you're part of is based on one of your direct-line ancestors. It will include everyone who has that ancestor in their family tree and has DNA evidence that links them to you or someone else in the circle. In other words, a circle includes all the identified genetic descendants of a particular person. It's a great way to discover cousins you never knew you had.

"Currently, you aren't in any DNA Circles. This can change as more people are tested. For the best chance of being included in a DNA Circle, make sure you link a public family tree to your results and add as many generations as you can."

That sounds interesting and helpful.  Does the system identify who should be in these DNA Circles, based on my DNA segment matches along with family tree shared ancestors?  How many matches do there have to be to form a DNA circle?  I don't know, but I'm anxious to find out!

3)  The top of the AncestryDNA Results page looks like this (two screens shown):



The results page shows that there are only 43 sets of 50 matches, so that's only about 2,150 matches instead of the approximately 10,400 matches I had yesterday.

The last page of these matches looks like this:


It appears that my matches end with "Moderate confidence" rather than "low confidence."  I think that's probably good.

My "Match Relationships" summary is:

*  1 3rd cousin
*  57 4th cousins
*  about 2,090 Distant cousins

I haven't compared the Matches at the top of the list with the Matches I had yesterday - my guess is that the closest relationships down to at least 4th cousins are the same.  It did tell me that my top match was a 3rd Cousin rather than a 4th cousin, but I knew that from the family tree comparison.

4)  What about Hints?  I have 49 matches with common ancestor Hints - down from 97 yesterday.  Here's the top of the "Matches with Hints" page:


My "Match Relationships with Hints" summary is:

*  1 3rd Cousin
*  4 4th Cousins
*  44 Distant cousins

They are all no worse than "Moderate confidence" - which appears to be 85% confidence if the green scale scales correctly.

6)  In summary, I've "lost" about 80% of my DNA matches - but all of them were "fair" to "very low" confidence.  I've lost about 50% of my "Matches with Hints" in the process.  At this time, I am not in any DNA Circles.

I look forward to seeing who is in my DNA Circles, assuming I'm lucky enough to have cousins with trees and enough common DNA to create them.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/11/first-look-at-improved-ancestrydna.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver





1 comment:

Debi Austen said...

I haven't received anything from ancestry telling me anything has been changed - I thought they were notifying everyone who has DNA results posted? I haven't been researching much recently so haven't even been on ancestry. When I went there today all I see is gobblety-gook (like *** tests.ethnicityestimate.insight.title *** as one of the headings) instead of anything close to being helpful.