I just got my DNA estimates

Question

This past Thursday I received my DNA results from Ancestry DNA and I've reviewed my ethnicities,possible cousin matches, and some Thrulines. What would be the best step? I've watched some YouTube clips and they were okay. And also with my Thrulines how do you evaluate records when there are just public trees and they don't contain any records or very few. Do I search for records on FamilySearch or Ancestry?

Answer 1

When you have a match on Thru Lines, you are related to the match but not necessarily the information on that person. Sometimes your matches might be misplaced in someone else's tree. So, you take each match that you want to research and do the research yourself. See if the person has any sources attached that make sense and go from there. You should also go to your Matches page and bring up the person from Thru Lines. Then do Shared Matches for that person and you will find other people who you both match which will help you figure out for sure how you all match each other and who the MRCA (most recent common ancestor) is.

You should also figure out using the dot system on Ancestry - that is a great help in sorting your matches. Give each set of Great Grandparents a colored dot. Find a good match in each set and do the shared matches dotting those matches with the color dot for each set of Great Grandparents. Then you can move up the line and pull out 2x great grandparents and dot them. This is a great organization method for your matches. Watch some You-Tube videos on the Ancestry dot system - there are several out there.

Good luck and have fun!

Comments

Thank you!

Answer 2

So many options for you to go forward.

When I knew nothing about DNA when I tested, I watched as may DNA videos as possible (I do not learn easily via video).  What helped me most were the ones at [https://familytreewebinars.com/]  some free, but most you have to pay for.   Then the youtube channels Genealogy TV and Family History Fanatics.

Now I quite know a bit more.  The main thing that these sites repeat over and over is that traditional research is the key to getting the best leverage from DNA results.   

So not easy, and you invariably WADE THROUGH THE MATCHES and hopefully find answers.

There are tools ans sites that help,  putting your results on other sites also helps  MyHeritage and Gedmatch (free),  FTDNA for a small fee,  which widens the net for matches.

There are also tools that can help such as DNA Painter. It can all be a bit hard to take in how to use, which I have not mastered as yet.  

Even then, I still have a few brick walls and more mysteries, for example my husband (Australian), seems to have many matches to Kuykendall and Bolling in South Carolina and I can not find ANY connection to the USA and the many Matches - there is a link somewhere... where?????

So I would pick on your closest match that has a tree, and stick to looking at the shared matches, which hopefully, will help you find the "generation of connection" and how you fit in the tree.

Comments

Thank you! I'm subscribed to Genealogy TV and Family History Fanatics both very good channels! I took advantage of MyHeritage's promotion of downloading your DNA to their site for free.  As with your brick wall, how interesting. Someone must've traveled by boat,but it's the trick of finding the who. I have numerous brick walls since my dad's side isn't very communicative about their heritage,so all of it is sorta new and unexpected.

Answer 3

I've found that most people who test their DNA, especially with Ancestry are sort of doing it for "fun." They are not much interested in Genealogy, which is why, as the others have said, you'll need to do your own research. Hopefully you are a bit younger than I am and can ask older relatives if any of these names seem familiar. My grandfather only remembered some last names and he got all the relationships wrong. For instance, he said is parents had friends named Biagi. Actually, his mother's cousin married a guy named Eugene Biggio. This also pointed to a reasonable way his parents met. Eugene was a liquor distributor and his father was a bartender. So, my great-grandmother was not a bar-fly!

I hope you have relatives that answer your messages!

Comments

So far I've had luck with messaging on Ancestry. I may have to wait for a long period of time, but I've had better luck with messaging on Ancestry. One of my brick walls is about one of my granduncles and I don't know a lot about them since he moved from IA to California and stayed there, and my aunts and dad know nothing about him. By the time they were old enough, he was already living in California and they really didn't care about genealogy. I found a possible tree that he was in so I messaged them and I got a response. They said that she has a picture of him and his wife drinking at a bar and is willing to email it to me or physically send it with other information.

Answer 4

someone shared this link here at Wikitree before and i found it very helpful grouping my matches

https://www.danaleeds.com/the-leeds-method-with-dots/

Comments

Thank you!

Answer 5

Nathan,

One of the things I have found that helps is to keep things in perspective. Several people have suggested you "wade through" the matches, but when I first started, that seemed like a daunting task with perhaps thousands of potential matches.  What to do next? It was overwhelming!

Then I remembered the old saying about how to eat an elephant (one bite at a time).

Start small. Start with you and your immediate family, then expand to grandparents. Then from here take one family line and follow it as far as you can with good sources. When you reach as far as you can, move to the next line, and then the next. One step at a time until you have a well sourced tree. Don't worry about hitting dead ends as you go.  You can come back to those later to do some serious research.

I started with about ten people in my tree, now I have more than 8500 (on Ancestry). Many people have a lot more, but they all started somewhere small.

Every answer here has included very good advice. I just find looking at the smaller pieces sometimes is the best way to go.

Hope this helps!

Comments

Thank you so very much! I'm the only one in my immediate family that has done a DNA test other than my mom who's done it on 23andMe. But I just realized that she can upload her raw DNA to MyHeritage and I can do it that way. The paternal side is unwilling to test DNA because they don't care. Starting small and organized is the key to success.

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That's a good plan! You can also do the same on GEDmatch. Today is the last day for the upload and free access to My Heritage DNA tools, so do it soon!

ken

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The link for the DNA uploads is Upload your DNA data for free to receive DNA Matches - MyHeritage 

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Thanks! I submitted my DNA to MyHeritage on Friday or yesterday and I submitted my mom's an hour or so ago.

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That's great!!! 

Answer 6

I found the best site to upload for me as a beginner was to gedmatch.com. The people there were the committed genealogists, not the people who just got a test for Christmas. 

I got help from people on there, who had smaller matches on my Ancestry list, but had done so much research about the people higher up my list. And as I developed my knowledge, I was able to get involved in some of the specific locality projects that added another layer of support.

 

Comments

Thanks! Just uploaded my DNA to GedMatch.