I have subscribed to Ancestry for a month in order to use the new "Enhanced Shared Matches" Pro Tool showing how many centimorgans, cMs, your matches share with each other. This has been a wonderful feature which has been available for years at 23andMe, and MyHeritage, at no additional charge. You need to have a regular Ancestry subscription in order to add Pro Tools, which is an additional $10 a month.
My main reason for using this feature is so I can see how shared matches are related to each other on a brickwall line. I'm using this mainly with my mother's kit. I don't really care how all 30,000 of my mother's matches are related to us. I'm just interested in matches descended from George Lafayette Campbell. I've been trying to resolve a brickwall on our Campbell line for over 20 years. Our ancestor Sarah Campbell died young. She also died before the 1850 Census, so we don't have any information from when she was alive as to where she was born? She was married to Anderson Wray and had a few children before her death. Only one Campbell was connected to the Wray family, his name was James Campbell and there is no surviving information about where he was from, or his relationship to Sarah Campbell-Wray? The children of Sarah stated on census records that she was born in Tennessee, and that is the only information about her they seemed to have.
Looking at my mother's matches related to Campbells I noticed there were a number who descended from George Lafayette Campbell of Greene County, Tennessee. These matches don't appear to relate to us any other way. If matches are closely related to each other such as siblings, first cousins, parents and children, it could be that we aren't related through the Campbell line. We may share a different line farther back. If they don't all descend from the same children of George Lafayette Campbell the circumstantial case is stronger. If we had the underlying segment information the case would be stronger still, but AncestryDNA doesn't provide this information making the process of attempting to establish relationships slower, and more of a hassle.
I'm gathering up the shared centimorgan information for descendants of George Lafayette Campbell and using a spreadsheet to document the shared cMs. I'm not documenting the shared cM's of every single descendant, only those sharing over 20cMs with my mother, or over 100 cMs with their shared matches, and those descended from different children of George. I want to make sure the descendants aren't closely related, or double cousins, or there wasn't endogamy in these families.
I am discovering more close family of my matches, and noting those. Problems I'm running into include few people with trees or very limited trees. As I go through the matches I'm again looking for matches with more complete trees. One match is related through another line. It's crucial to have segment data to sort out matches who may not be related through Campbell.
It's a slow process sorting through the information because AncestryDNA has information on so many pages, unlike MyHeritage where you can see all of the information about a match on one page. I've created notes for matches who descend from George Lafayette Campbell. I haven't been able to filter notes to bring up only notes regarding those descendants. To get to these matches I have to use the Chrome Browser search feature. Every time I return to the match list I have to search the notes again, which is another reason I'm only documenting a few descendants of George.
When I Googled to see if there was a way to search notes I got this AI response: "As of January 2023, it's not possible to search notes on AncestryDNA, but users can use custom groups to help. However, users can find notes and comments for people in their tree on that person's profile page. Notes and comments can be found in the research tools bar to the right of the profile photo, and in the Tools menu."
I'm finding some of the matches are very closely related, such as parent child, aunts and uncles. Most matches aren't, which is good for my hypothesis.
Before using the new Pro Tool the matches attached to this tree (below) were our main connections to the George Lafayette Campbell family. Using the shared matches tool I've found close family members of these matches that don't have trees, or a tree with a couple people on it.
I've also looked at some close matches we didn't know how we were related to. Some of these matches have close relatives which I've found with the new tool. A couple of their matches have trees allowing me to find our relationship. We have thousands of matches and I'm not interested in determining how every match is related. This has helped with a few close matches, which is good.
I now have 29 matches sharing descent from George Lafayette Campbell. There are many more shared matches without trees who likely share that descent too.
This is the spreadsheet I've made to track all the shared cM totals and predicted relationships. The predicted relationships seem a little too close in some cases. I'm recording the match names across the top and side of the spreadsheet and filling in the information. There may be a better way, but this is working for me.
Here is an example of the information I'm recording. This shows how Mary is related to our shared matches in the Campbell line. The names of the matches are on the left (I didn't include them for privacy reasons). I'll probably add which George Lafayette Campbell child each match descends from.
It is good to know how many distinct matches you have when looking at shared matches. Sometimes people test a bunch of close relatives so your shared matches may be closely related. If they are closely related and have not extended their tree far enough back you may not be able to determine how you are related. Creating chromosome maps helps confirm relationships. You can't do that at Ancestry.
Also, if AncestryDNA had more information about a match on one page it would save a lot of clicking back and forth.
This new Pro Tool is very helpful, but not a game changer. A chromosome browser or segment data would be the game changer we really need.
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