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Margaret in Burton
03-01-20, 21:08
My brother in law recently did a DNA test with Ancestry. He got a message from someone who should be his 3rd or 4th cousin. I’m still compiling his tree so it isn’t online as yet. The person gave me and my sister access to her tree on Ancestry but we couldn’t find the link. We focussed on the name Oldham as both had them.

Red herring

I persuaded this person to send me a GEDCOM of her tree and uploaded it to family tree maker. Found the connection in seconds. 3rd cousins.

Not Oldham’s but Smith’s. They share 2 x great grand parents.

Ancestry trees don’t appear to have a relationship calculator.

The old fashioned ways are still needed.

Janet
04-01-20, 16:34
You're not kidding, Marg. All the computer algorithms in the world will never substitute for simply thinking things through. I've often wished Ancestry trees would provide a relationship calculator, though. Sometimes it would be very helpful.

Margaret in Burton
04-01-20, 21:11
You're not kidding, Marg. All the computer algorithms in the world will never substitute for simply thinking things through. I've often wished Ancestry trees would provide a relationship calculator, though. Sometimes it would be very helpful.

Exactly Janet

Why doesn’t Ancestry have a relationship calculator?

The person who’s tree it is was amazed I solved it so quickly. She’s been pouring over it for days. Concentrating on the Oldham red herring no doubt,
We’d still be looking if I hadn’t suggested a GEDCOM.

I suppose had my brother in laws tree been online with his DNA result it may have been easier but his results came through quicker than we expected and with Christmas and New Year I’d not been doing the research.

marquette
06-01-20, 21:24
I have recently added my Mum's DNA sample to our family group. So I am working my way through her 340 close matches. There are 3 very large groups - one is her mother's Creek relatives (originally from Cambridgeshire) the other two belong to her Kerr and Laurie families from Dumfries and Lanarkshire.

Others though, I have no idea where the DNA match comes from, they have no common matches and few family trees.

Sometimes I look at a small family tree and if I can find a name and birth or death date, I will do a little investigating. Mostly I fail to achieve any results - the name is too common, the dates seem wrong, or I cannot find any trace of the person, or their ancestors in a census. You would think that I could find a name in the Freebmd index and then use the GRO index to find the mothers maiden name. Then I could find a marriage and work back from there - no, not usually, or after 3 generations, there are no common surnames or places or the family thread becomes lost.

Dad has a large group of people who match with his DNA and each other, but very few of his other matches - his match and one other known match lead me to believe they are related to his paternal line, but not one of them can show me anyone born outside the USA. Another large-ish group of his matches related to a Wakefield family in the US - but I traced them back to Ireland, but as far as I know Dad has no Irish ancestors.

Di

Kit
07-01-20, 05:22
The US matches bother me. They either have no tree or a huge tree that goes so far back, my tree is not large enough to make a match and the generation gaps don't seem to fit with the cms.

I dump them in a US coloured dot and hope one day I can sort it out. I know some are connected to each other by names in the trees but those names mean nothing to me.