Monday, August 31, 2020

The Effect of AncestryDNA's Purge on my Family's Test

I'm probably in the minority, but I've been looking forward to the purge.  I have felt it will make it much easier to work with the matches that I have that are closer and perhaps keep me from falling down a few rabbit holes.  If you look at the numbers and the percentage that were lost among my family's tests it seems like a lot.  I feel like it is more focused now though.  Before the purge I went thru and looked at the matches in the 6-7 cM range who shared a Common Ancestor with me.  Some of those shared more with one or both of my siblings so I will still see them in their match list. I still have plenty of matches to work with and those matches are at a higher confidence level.  


I was really glad to see that the purge took care of the Thruline that was making me crazy.  I had a match of  6 cM who was showing in Thrulines as the grandchild of my Paternal Aunt.  It was caused by someone attaching my Aunt's census records to a woman with the same name who was born in the same year and who also had parents similar in name to my Grandparents, Thomas DeWitt Cooke & Pearl G. Jakes Cooke.   The DNA match was a maternal one though which I could see when I viewed my Mom's test though she shared the same small amount with that tester.  

I hope this will show improvement across all of my Thrulines and keep me more focused.  It would be nice if we had the ability to filter similar matches at FTDNA.  I know you can download and filter matches at FTDNA but an onsite filter is so much more functional.  All of the DNA testing sites could do a better job of match list presentation.  AncestryDNA has really made improvements in theirs which make all the others look "clunky".  Perhaps now they can add a search location which will search more fields than just the birth location.  

1 comment:

  1. We'll see. I tried to save as many of the small matches that were useful as I could, but they literally disappeared as I was "starring" the smallest of them. And from what I see now, the work on starring those with trees did nothing -- they all seem to be gone. For my Colonial ancestors, that really is a pity. I did get all the "common ancestors" done for both me and my husband, so ..... :/

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