AncestryDNA Shared Matches to Solve Genealogy Research Questions

we're going to use ancestrydna to help you with your family history research questions when we come back [Music] all right well welcome back to another episode on genealogy tv i am so glad you're here uh just a quick uh note if you are her first time here uh my name is connie knox i am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family research now uh don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell so that you get notified each time i upload a video and i also know that there is a facebook page a newsletter and a website links for all of that stuff will be in the show notes below and so we're going to jump into it right now so we're going to talk about getting you up and running with your ancestry dna results now this strategy can be used with any dna results it doesn't have to be ancestry but we're going to demonstrate it on ancestry and so we're going to jump into it right now so what we're going to do is i've got a powerpoint presentation here so i can't click through every little uh detail but we're certainly going to give it a try so here we go all right so when you are first logged into ancestry you can get to your uh cousin matches which is the gold this is where the answers to all your questions hopefully will be is in the cousin matches now uh ethnicity results are great but they really don't help really fine-tune the answers to our ancestry questions other than maybe some migration patterns and some ethnicity estimates and kind of give us some clues but it doesn't really help us absolutely define who our ancestors are but we're going to get to that all here in just a moment so we're going to be looking at the dna cousin matches there are a couple ways you can get to it you can click on the dna tab directly and and hit this drop down where it says dna matches also know that if you find yourself on the uh other dna screen like if if you went to it straight from the dna tab you would also get to it from this center box right here where it says dna matches and then you can click through okay we're not going to talk a lot about through lines today we're just really focused on the dna cousin matches which is where uh where the gold is okay so step one is just really to define what your research question is what is it that you want to know more about and so with that in mind uh you can move on to step two and so uh as we're going through our progress here step two is gonna obviously be using the dna cousin matches but we're really looking at the fourth cousins or closer and ideally first and second cousins it just kind of depends on your research question we'll talk more about that here in just a moment but with all of our cousin matches once we click through to that we get this list now i've blocked out the names of some of these people here but you'll get a list where all of your dna cousins are kind of falling into different buckets now ancestry uses the parent child bucket they have the sibling bucket they also have a first cousin bucket a second cousin bucket a third cousin bucket and so on it kind of depends on the dna that you have with your cousins so we've got this list here i've kind of filtered it i just scrolled down basically to just the first and second cousins that's about all i could fit on the screen at the moment and so really if we can use our first and second cousins you're going to have best chance of success with this strategy but we can do this with third and fourth cousins as well it just takes a little bit more work so in looking at our first cousin and second cousin you can see the buckets on the on the left hand side here here's the first cousin and the second cousin um but really once you start getting into the list you start to see that it's giving you a range first and second cousin and it shows you the trees and if they are showing a common ancestor well that what that means is that you have it in your tree they have it in their tree and it's showing you that there's a common ancestor there down here you can see where there's a lock on this tree that means it's a private tree that doesn't stop you from contacting that cousin though and asking them for more information so as we uh now move on to our next step we're really going to start kind of identifying one side of the family from another and this is where you can really kind of focus uh your efforts with your family dna cousins and we're going to divide the family tree up into a couple different groups now we're going to also use ancestry has a really powerful color coding system that you can customize to help mark these different cousins in such a way that you can really kind of filter down so let's take a look at the family tree for a moment this is the ancestral view you're at the bottom and your parents and then your grandparents and your great grandparents okay so what we want to do is you could do one of a couple things you could divide your family your cousin dna matches into your father's side versus your mother's side or you could do all four grandparents so you would actually have four groups each with a different grandparent and along the way you could color code your grandparents or your father's side your mother's side if you only have two groups this is really ideal for helping people with missing parentage people who are adopted or trying to find their biological family any kind of ancestry research question if you've taken a dna test this is where the gold is at this is really what you want to uh you want to do to help your research further okay all right so let's pretend for a moment we're trying to solve for our paternal grandfather all right so i put a big question mark on this guy all right so if we're trying to find him then what we want to do using our cousin matches is we want to separate out our cousin matches from one side of the family to the other so what we do is we then take a look at our cousin matches and i'm going to show you how to do this here in a second we're going to take your cousin matches and you're going to identify this family well how do you do that if you're trying to solve for this grandfather what you're going to do is you're going to be looking at the descendants of this grandfather and so let's pretend for a moment that this grandfather and grandmother have had children and so these would be in this scenario would be your uh aunts and uncles well those people have had children and those people uh have become basically those are your first cousins right so knowing that keep this in mind and this this is a very simplistic graph here but this works with second cousins and third cousins but keep in mind that these first cousins have these grandparents in common okay so these are your common ancestors for you and your first cousins okay this would also be the same thing if you were trying to solve for a great grandparent then the common ancestor would be with your second cousins and your great grandparents okay so common ancestors in this scenario are your grandparents and one of the quick ways to remember this i have a trick that i just you know in my head i i was trying to figure out a way that i could remember this quickly so i count the g's grandparent being 1g great grandparent being two g's great and grandparent right so if it's two g's that's your second cousins that are gonna have a great grandparent in common first cousins one g for a grandparent so that's a quick and dirty way to figure it out so if you uh our cousin matches with somebody who is a third cousin then you're going to have a great great grandparent in common you may not know who they are yet but that's that's a simplistic way now when you start getting into half siblings and um pedigree uh you know collapse with cousins marrying cousins and such it can get a little more complicated but this is a simplistic view and a simplistic trick to remembering it so now we're going to move on to step four which is separating the cousins along family lines okay so now we know what our research question is we know uh kind of we have an understanding of what cousins we're going after we're going to separate these cousins out along these family lines now uh one of the next things that you need to understand is with these cousins i'm let me let me back up just for a second i'm going to explain this example with a real life situation this is my first cousin once removed carol she's kindly allowed me to use her uh her image and name to help me explain this she is first cousins with my father i am the child of my father therefore the once removed so uh first cousin once removed the remove part if you're not familiar with it just simply means a generational difference so my daughter for example would be first cousin twice removed okay so carol and i uh have a common ancestor herman miller madsen is my great grandfather but is carol's grandfather because she's one generation closer uh to herman than i am okay all right so here's carol in the cousin list okay and she's falling into the second cousin bucket and as you can see at the top but she's really the first cousin once removed so i just want to make sure that everybody was clear on that and so when i click on carol from the the list of cousin matches the screen comes up and it looks like this and it shows us that we are 464 centimorgans apart and it gives us some more information it shows us that herman miller madsen is the common ancestor along with his wife francis and so the real gold here is clicking on the shared matches tool so now i know that carol is in the madsen line because herman and francis madsen are our common ancestors so i'm going to mark carol as being a madison descendant right so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to say all right i want to look at all of the cousins that carol and i have in common because all of those dna cousins are going to be madison descendants okay so if i click on that now i have a filtered list of just madison descendants okay and i can go through and as you can see here i've already marked a few of them with the madsen color coding system and i'll show you how that works so basically what you do is you click on the little plus and you add a group now if you've never done this before you wouldn't have anybody here and what you would do is you would click on this create custom group plus button and you would be able to open it up and add your own group so maybe you want to just go uh father side and mother side and just have two groups because you don't know maybe you don't know who your father is so you're trying to figure out who that is well if you can identify somebody on your mother's side and then use the shared matches tool like we're doing here then you can mark everybody that's on your mother's side and then when you unfilter it everybody that's left that doesn't have a mark next to them as being on your mother's side they've got to be on your father's side okay now in this case i'm using my four grandparents okay so i have marked i have created these groups with the four grandparents and i've actually gone a little bit farther on another line but as you can see i'm marking all of these dna cousins that i have in common with carol and i'm marking them as medicine that have manson ancestors in their families in their dna so what i've done is i've color-coded all four of my grandparents these glenn and beverly are my parents and then glenn curry at the top and elma are my grandparents on my father's side and ellsworth and helen are my grandparents on my mother's side and so i have created a group as you can see here for each one of them and so i have i can go through and i can do the same thing on the unfiltered cousin list and i can say okay wait a minute i know one of these cousins is on my henley side of the family so then i hit that shared matches tool i drill into that cousin hit the shared matches tool and i get all of the cousins that we have in common because i know that that dna cousin with me uh is on the henley side because i know that to be a henley cousin so then i can take everybody in that list and i can mark them as henley henley henley henley henley and i can mark them all down that i unfilter the list and i can go back and i can say all right now i want to do all the madsens and so i find that cousin carol who i know to be on the matson side of the family and i click on her i hit the shared matches tool i filter that list all the way down to just people that are in common with me and carol and i mark them all as mats at mats and mats and mats and madsen all the way down to third or fourth cousins until i get sick of doing it and then um you don't need to go beyond fourth cousins and then i do it again i unfilter it i go back to the mat the the full list unfiltered cousin list and i say all right now who have i got left some of these other cousins uh i may not know because i don't know much about my booth side of the family and i can kind of drill into some of these other cousins that are not marked and i can go okay wait a minute this guy's got booth in his surname he's got to be on the booth side i can do that a couple times just to verify and if it's something like smith everybody's got smith on all sides of their family right but booth is a little bit unique so i can then go in and i can uh focus on a couple of the cousins that have booths in their in their surnames and click on them and then drill into them hit shared matches and mark them all as booths and i can do the same with the simmons line and so on so by the time i'm done some of my cousins might have um multiple dots next to them here you can see uh while i've blocked out their names my sisters here have multiple dots because they're in they're descendants of all four grandparents right you can also click on the little uh button here that that has the little paper and add notes while you're in the cousin match level also pay attention to the filtering so all of these across the top here are filters in this uh page i had them filtered down to just the madsen line so pay attention to what you're filtering and then you can hit the back button at the top of the screen to go back and unfilter everything or you can click this down arrow right here and at the bottom of the list there is a reset button and you can unfilter everything there so now we're back to the list that is unfiltered and you can see all the different dots here okay so now what do we do now we've organized our our dna list by the different lines in the tree to the best of our ability and it might be you're not sure so you might want to leave it unmarked but in step five here what we do is we take those shared matches and we filter it back down to what our research question was so we were originally looking for that paternal grandfather so we might filter that list back down to just that line and then um start digging into those cousin matches and looking at their trees looking at their profiles and digging into their trees and looking at their sources looking at the records that are there and see if there are any clues now you should also be reaching out to some of these better quality contacts now people that have two people in their trees not going to help you a lot but some of these cousins are going to have a lot of people in their tree you can contact them and pay attention to the surnames that are in their trees alright so if we're on the page where carol and i were together on the page it's going to show you a tree you can drill into the tree in the green areas because carol and i both have ancestors in our tree this isn't carol's tree this is actually somebody else's but it shows you who the common ancestors are over here it also shows you how they line up in the tree and we can also message somebody from the message button is at the top of the screen in the upper right corner you can expand this tree and really dig into um their tree and with a couple clicks of the expand button you can get down into what looks like the regular ancestry tree so you can drill into the tree and and then really kind of dig into each of the profiles of some of the people you're researching see if they have any more records or any more resources that you don't have um you should also pay attention to uh the surnames now i'm back on this page with carol and at the bottom if you scroll down at the bottom it shows you the shared match the shared surnames which in this case was madsen but it also shows you carol's surnames that are in her tree that i might not have alright so now hopefully that has given you some uh modicum of success and you have found some new research tools maybe some new family members some new records some new trees some new cousins that you didn't know before this is where the gold is at this is where you can really make some progress with your research by using the shared cousin matches and uh just to kind of recap the five steps again first step is just figure out what it is that you want to research second step is to review the cousin matches in its entirety unfiltered the third step is to identify one side of the family by using a cousin match that you know or you suspect is on one line or the other that you're researching and then the step four is to separate those cousins along family lines using the color coding system the shared matches tool you're going to drill in to those cousins and then mark all of those cousins with the color coding system and then step five is to research the filtered cousin matches on the line specific to your research question and see if you can find more in the trees more by contacting the cousins and also um by digging into some of the records uh there there's a lot of things you can do there so if you don't find success with this keep trying you may have to wait for more cousin matches to show up uh and you know you can consider uploading your dna to jedcom i've got a another video about how to download your raw dna from ancestry you can then upload it to another service like jet match or my heritage or some of the other services if you upload it to places like myheritage and couple of the other places you may have to pay for that service gen match is free there is some higher level um paid parts of ged match but i believe for the basic level you can upload for free and please make sure you uh set it to be used by law enforcement uh and so well that's it i mean you can upload other services and cast a wider net if you are not getting enough cousin matches now if you're doing this on um another service another other than ancestry you might consider using ancestry because they're going to have more cousin matches they got a bigger database than anybody else out there and if you don't have an ancestor dna kit i'll leave an affiliate link in the show notes below uh if you want to consider uh getting an ancestry dna kit i really have had tremendous success um using this technique over and over and over again uh to help my clients and to help others uh find their family family history uh so that's kind of it i i hope that helps you know there's there's more videos on the screen right now for you that are based around the dna theme at ancestry and well it is time for you to go find your ancestors so until next time keep on climbing your family tree

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 50,023

Rating: 4.9395189 out of 5

Keywords: #familyhistory, #GenealogyTV, #genealogy, genealogy, family history, genealogy research, family tree, how to find family history, learn how to research your family tree for free, AncestryDNA: Using Cousin Matches for Your Genealogical Research, ancestryDNA kits, ancestrydna, ancestry dna results, dna cousins, ancestry, ancestry.com, genetic genealogy, Ancestrydna results, understanding dna matches, 1st cousin once removed, how to Separate Cousin Matches Along Family Lines

Id: vm9WRkyaE14

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020