AncestryDNA | What To Do With All Those Matches | Ancestry

hi everyone Cristian here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist today's topic is ancestry DNA and there's a lot to cover and so right up front let me just tell you what we are going to cover and what we're not gonna cover so that you're really clear about what this video entails I did a video several months ago about DNA ethnicity and also a little bit of information in there about the science behind how DNA is passed down so we're not gonna talk about that today if you have not viewed that previous video you can find it on our YouTube channel when we archive this I'll make sure a link gets put in the comments just below the video so that you can link directly to that video so that's not what we're gonna talk about today well we are going to talk about today is cousin matches so if you've had if you've taken the ancestry DNA test you know that you get all of these matches of people who share DNA with you and several of you have expressed some frustration or some confusion about what to do with all of those DNA matches and so that's very specifically what we're gonna talk about today now even with that specific of a focus we still have a lot to cover and so I've broken today's presentation into two really distinct parts our show is usually about 20 minutes long and I have a feeling today we are probably gonna run about 40 minutes so for the first 20 minutes if that's all you have time to spend with us we're gonna talk specifically about what these cousin matches are what they mean and what tools are available to you to help review and analyze them then in the second 20 minute segment if you can stick around for that or if you can watch it later on replay I'll show you exactly how I do how I use the program how I have searched my cousin matches to find the common ancestor what kinds of tips and tricks that I've picked up along the way that might help you so again that's gonna be two 20 minute segments today if you can only stick around for the first 20 minutes that's fine we will have both as two separate videos hopefully on our YouTube channel when we archive this later today or tomorrow so without much of an introduction let's go ahead and dive in lots to cover today let's start by talking about just some basic information about why we provide these cousin matches we've had some people question what the purpose of them is a lot of people take the DNA test with various expectations some people take the DNA test simply to get the ethnicity information but the real power behind ancestry DNA the real value is these matches these matches that connect you to other people that you are related to and some of you that may not be that exciting but for me and hopefully I can impart some of this I find this really exciting that we can find other people that we are certainly related to and that we can then work with them to further grow our family tree now of course the goal and the challenge that we have is figuring out exactly how we are related to those cousin matches sometimes it's really easy and it's really obvious sometimes it's not so obvious and it takes a little bit of effort sometimes it's really not obvious and it takes a lot of effort and those are kind of the three tiers of how I approach this and low hanging fruit and and then you kind of work your way through the more complicated matches but it's kind of like a mystery I feel a little bit like a detective sometimes as I try to solve some of these problems and make some of these connections it's like the world's greatest puzzle and it's exciting to be able to wrap my head around it and to dig into one of these problems and to it's even more exciting when I actually solve it so and that's the goal so the question has been asked how is this any different then than just the regular shaky leaf tree matches that we get when we have our tree on minor and Family Tree Maker and here's the answer that I received from our DNA it's human I loved it so much I just wrote it down word for word they said DNA matches our hints that are backed up by the science so if you have somebody in that list of and we know that you share DNA with that person that's that's scientific now what DNA you share with them how much DNA you share with them and where you connect on your tree of course then is the challenge or the puzzle that we're trying to solve so there I feel like they're a lot more valuable than the regular tree matches because I know I'm related to this person and I've already started connecting with several of these people and we've been able to prove out more fully information on our family tree I inherited a lot of my my genealogy from parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and haven't gone through my whole tree yet to document every piece of information and so it's been exciting for me to see matches coming up through through distant relatives and I'm talking about ancestors who lived in the 16 and 1700s even and to know that that that gives more credence to that connection that I'm really climbing up the right branches that I'm not fabricating my family tree and that it's not just you know just something that clicked and matched but it's actually backed up by the science so let's talk a little bit then about just what experience people are having so that you can kind of gauge where you're at in this on this scale on average we've discovered that ancestry DNA participants have about twenty fourth cousin matches and that is up from about twelve six months ago six months ago I attended a conference where I listened to one of the DNA product managers talking about how the average DNA participant had had 12 fourth cousin matches and now six months later were up to 20 and as more and more people take the DNA test that number will only increase you'll have more and more possibilities more and more cousins to connect to not only that most active customers have found on average about 40 shared relatives so you've got your twenty fourth cousins and that means that twenty more of these are in your distant cousins that fifth to sixth cousin range and if you haven't looked at that well I'll show you that in just a minute so let me just give you my experience I have one third cousin match and I have 17 fourth cousin matches so that's 18 and so that makes me a little bit below average however one of the things that I've discovered is that in those distant cousin matches I have actually identified one more third cousin and two more fourth cousins that the the way that the DNA was handed down to each of us it made it look like we were not as related and so they showed up in my distant cousin matches and one of them even with very low confidence and it turns out that that I had one third cousin into fourth cousins buried in those distant cousin matches that I was able to pluck out so now I'm up to 21 either third or fourth cousin matches and that's really exciting for me and lots of really great things that we've been able to share and some connections that have been made and and and so those closer connections are exciting but the distant connections still have some value as well those other 20 people that most active customers find have helped them grow their tree and what we're discovering is that they're finding one new common ancestor a week and that's huge I have new matches showing up every single day and that's more people to help to help and more people to discover now let's talk about presents for just a minute so sorry about this cold of mine I just didn't want to delay this presentation so let's talk about cousins for just a minute sometimes people aren't don't quite understand the math of it all or they don't quite understand what cousin relationships mean or how they connect so if you were around several months ago you may remember that I created a chart called what's your number it was actually in the first DNA presentation that I did where we just started to wrap our heads around the idea about how many possible ancestors we have and how many of those we've actually identified so I reworked that chart just a little bit and now we're looking at it from this perspective of common ancestors so let's start with the low numbers because those are easier to understand at least for me if you have a first cousin that means you have a common grandparent and you have four grandparents that's how you read this chart so if somebody shows up as a first cousin match and I don't have any of those yet you share you have four possible grandparents that you can connect on now I know all of my first cousins I know every one of them personally I know all of my second cousins and if I haven't met them I at least know of them or I'm friends with them on Facebook so so those people I'm pretty good I'm pretty confident about but when we start hitting these third cousin level that's where we start at least in my family I start losing people you know my grandmother's first cousins have had children and grandchildren those grandchildren would be my third cousins and I don't know all of them I don't even know about all of the heffman and but what that means is that we have a common great-great grandparents and there are 16 of those now I know I personally know all 16 of my great-great grandparents I've got you know I don't personally know them I've got documentation about them I have them entered in my family tree I have information about them now in the very next generation and this is where you're gonna find that about 20 on average twenty fourth cousins if you remember if you're a fourth cousin it means you have a common third great-grandparents a great great great grandparents you have 32 of those now I don't know what your tree looks like but I only know 30 of my 32 third great-grandparents so what that means is that if I can't figure out how they connect to me it could be that couple that I'm missing is the connection or it could be that they don't know that my match doesn't know all 32 of their third great-grandparents and so maybe I can work with them to help them identify more of their third great-grandparents so that we can make that connection okay and then that that's somewhere I'm going to stop with this example because that's the easy math after that it starts getting a little more complicated it is certainly not impossible but it does get a little bit more complicated and so get your head wrapped around this this fourth cousin level and then then maybe you can move on a little bit further once you've figured that out so that's just how cousins work and how common ancestors work and hopefully that helps give you an idea of the scope of things that we're dealing with when we start talking about these fifth through eighth cousins right we're talking a thousand people here that we have to connect on that we have the possibility of connecting on now let's just talk about some basic steps to success with your DNA matches there are some things that will help you be more successful in identifying and the common ancestors there will some there are some things that will help you be more successful in connecting with other people and there are some things that will help us as a community be more successful as we start to share and dig into and figure out these common ancestors so the first piece of advice well the first piece of advice is make sure you have a tree make sure you have an online family tree if you do not have a family tree online you um basically you're gonna have to do all the work yourself and if you have your tree online then anybody who shows you as a match can look at that tree and they can work with you to figure out the common ancestor if you do not have your tree online you're gonna have to do all that work so make sure you've got a tree online then make sure that you've attached your DNA results to the appropriate person in your family tree here's why this is important right so both of my parents are still living and so I made the decision to have each of my parents tested rather than to take the test myself and I did that because I wanted to be able to separate the DNA results I wanted to be able to look at a match and know whether it came from my father's side of the family or my mother's side of the family and so having each of them take the test because they're both still living made the most sense now I have one grandparent still living and I'm probably gonna have her take the test as well because that will help me further identify the split in my father's DNA the matches that she has in common with my with my father will probably be on her line and if there are matches that are on his list that don't show up on her list then they likely come from his father's side of the family so there are some things you can do there but make sure you attach your results to the appropriate person in your family tree I did not attach them to myself because I'm not the one who took the test don't attach them to the home person maybe you know if it's not the person that took the test so that's really really critical also and I can't emphasize this enough become very familiar with your own family tree now that may seem like a really silly thing but as I started digging into my own matches one of the things that I discovered was that I had six seventh eighth great-grandparents whose names I would not have recognized if you had if you had dropped them in my lap and as a matter of fact some of them were dropped in my lap as as matches and I breezed right over them because I didn't know that they were my ancestor and it's because again in my case anyway I inherited a lot of my family history from cousins are from parents and aunts and uncles who had done a lot of genealogy research over the last 50 years and and I had not paid attention to some of those branches of the family tree and so what I did was I just printed a surname list by Generation and I did that straight out of my family tree maker program where I could just say you know what show me you know this particular I want to see all of my third great-grandparents are all of my fourth great-grandparents all of my fifth great-grandparents and then I just exported that into a surname list so that I could start to become more familiar with those surnames at one point I even printed it out on a long strip of paper and tacked it up on my desk so that I could see it that was a very long strip of paper however and it started getting in my way so we've moved it since then but just become very familiar with your own family tree so that when you do come across some of these matches you start to recognize them and then the third piece of advice I have for you is just have a system for reviewing and analyzing your matches one of the challenges with family history and I'm sure many of you can identify with this is that we often are distracted I get I get called down rabbit holes by various cousins and aunts and uncles and their descendants and you know all of a sudden I started working on one thing and I'm three generations and four states away an hour later trying to figure out what just happens so it's really easy in family history and genealogy research to get distracted or to become quickly disorganized and so have a system for reviewing and analyzing those matches and I'll show you in the in the second 20 minute segment today I'll show you my own system it's not by any stretch of the imagination the definitive system but and hopefully it'll give you some ideas or sparks and thoughts for you that can help you create your own system so that you can figure out how to do that now we have provided you with a lot of tools to to do this and so let's just in the last few minutes of this first segment here let's just review the tools that are available for you to review and analyze your DNA matches so here is here are my father's DNA results you can see that the ethnicity section is here at the top and I I wasn't really excited about that I didn't care one way or the other I was more excited about cousin matches and so that's the meat of it for me in particular and it's just this giant list right so I have this whole list of matches and usually I think the default here is all and it sorts by relationship and it shows you the full relationship range and so you can see there my one third cousin and there are my seventeen fourth cousin matches and then we get into these distant cousin matches that are 5th to 8th cousins and varying degrees of confidence about that relationship and I just scroll down further through this list you're gonna discover I think that I have 38 pages of those and that's it's really easy to get very quickly overwhelmed with that and I don't want you to be overwhelmed there are some things we can do here to just really be systematic about this so the first tool that ancestry.com has provided for you and this is fairly new and for me super exciting is under the filters we now have an option for has a hint and what you may notice or may have already noticed is that on some of your matches you have a little shaky leaf right just like you do in your tree when you're digging into your online tree what that means what that means is that ancestry.com has has discovered that you have a DNA match with this person and then we have also compared your two trees online and been able to figure out exactly who your common ancestor is so if I click here on this match it's going to take me to a chart here that is going to show me exactly how this other user and my father are related and in this case it's not even it's not even just a third cousin he is a second cousin to my grandmother so he's a second cousin once removed that's really exciting that's what we call low-hanging fruits when you can see exactly how you're related not only that we've all got pictures in here and this is a pretty family tree now here's the thing about this particular match though in my case I didn't know who he was I had no clue I had no clue who his mother was even though she and my grant great-grandmother are first cousins I knew about his grandmother but we had lost somehow lost that thread of the family after after that so so it's really great for making some of those connections or remaking some of those connections now because this is such a close connection again even an exciting thing about this is is that that means that all of our ancestors beyond that our shared ancestors so starting right here in his tree all of these people that he has are also my ancestors and so I can review history see what research he has done that I can that I can have him share with me so that I can continue to grow my family tree see what holes I have or what things I'm missing that's really exciting so again you're gonna find that by filtering here and into has a hint and you'll be able to then go through and review each one of these matches to see to see what what exactly how you're related now there are some other options here the other one that I use the most often is this not viewed I have a brand-new fourth cousin this guy just showed up this morning I haven't had a chance to look at it yet and so I can go through these now you'll notice here we have now added when they last logged in so this guy last logged in last week it looks like this guy last logged in a couple of days ago if it doesn't say anything either either they haven't logged in in a while or we haven't been able to tell when they last logged in so so that can give you an idea and one of the things we discovered is that anybody has taken the DNA test is much more active of course this is mostly because only provided it to only made the test available to subscribers for the first long while and I've only just recently opened it up to non subscribers but a lot more active people the other thing you're gonna notice here is that will tell you if they have a tree how many people are in that tree now we'll talk in the second segment here in just a few minutes about how that number doesn't really matter or in some cases it doesn't matter but but it gives you an idea of what you're getting into if there's a little lock attached it means that that person has a private tree now I get just as frustrated as some of you get with private trees but my tree was private until just very recently I had people contacting me almost daily saying hey we're a DNA match will you share your tree hey you're a DNA match where you share your tree and I finally just made the decision to go ahead and make my tree public my tree was private simply because I have a reputation as a genealogist to protect and because I have inherited a lot of my family history and not vetted much of it and I didn't want to make it public with all its mistakes and and whatnot but I just decided you know what this is more important and so I went ahead and made my tree public and have actually had some even better communication now with some users so if somebody's tree is private don't just dismiss it out of hand go ahead and send them a message you can do that when you're reviewing their match there is an option here to send them a message be nice we have received reports of people saying that private tree owners are getting some not-so-nice messages so I would encourage you to be nice and ask them if they can see your tree if they can figure out or share how you're related they let them know that you're willing to help figure out the shared connection if they are willing to invite you as a guest to their tree and maybe even share a few of your surnames with them so that they can feel a little bit more comfortable having that you should giving you that kind of access everybody has their own reasons for keeping their trees private so don't assume that you know what those reasons are or that they're not willing to share because many many many of them are more than willing to share their tree or to work with you to figure those things out you can also add a note here and we've enabled that on everything where you can just make a note to yourself that you sent them a message once you send them a message it will actually say here that you've communicated with them so that you know that there are messages but but you do have the opportunity to do that as well now I'm gonna go ahead and mark this as not viewed because I didn't actually do anything with it yet and I don't want to lose it off my list which is another thing you can do one of the final features on here well there's two more that I just want to share with you and then we'll dive into the second segment or I'll actually walk you through how I have done some of these things for myself the other filter that I use quite a bit is this starred feature so what you'll discover is that as I have gone through and either made notes on people which I can hover over and see or if if I've discovered what the connection is if I've discovered what the connection is I can see I can I forgot ahead and you starred that so that I can see what that connection is and then it brings up this whole list here of people that I've starred so for me those are people either that I know I've got a conviction with or people that I'm fairly certain I know what the connection is so that I can go back and do some further research the final thing here I want to show you the final tool that we've provided you with has to do with this date sort so I just have started using this and basically what it is is it's um you can sort all of your results by by how recent they are and as this program grows and as people start to have more and more results this may be a really quick easy way for you a systematic way for you to work through those and if you haven't gotten to some that are three or four or five months old maybe you want to start with some of the more matches like I said these are my matches just in the last week this one is brand-new today and it's a fourth cousin as a matter of fact if I - if I scroll down this list I will show you right oh wow here so that far down my list everything above that is new as of yesterday so lots and lots and lots of new stuff coming online every single day lots of new people taking this test every single day so if you don't yet have your twenty fourth cousin matches rest assured that as more and more people take this test that will happen so that is the end of part 1 of our presentation today if you've been with us before you know that these presentations are typically 20 to 25 minutes long we've run 27 minutes now in segment 1 and I knew that we had a lot to cover today and that this was a very hot topic a very excuse me a very current and a very relevant topic for many of you and so I wanted to make sure that I provided you with as much information as possible so if you can stick around with us for the next 20 minutes I will be sharing with you just some tips and tricks for how I've done it and the system that I'm using to manage my DNA matches and some of the communications and some of the successes that I've had so welcome to part 2 of ancestry DNA what to do with all of those matches if you have not yet watched part one if you're watching an archived version of this video please do so the link is just below the video and it's going on YouTube we'll put it in the description for the video so that you can watch part one here's what we're going to be talking about in part two just a little bit about how I do my DNA matches the system that I've come up with or the system that I've discovered that works best for me to keep track of things now what you're looking at here on your screen is actually my desk here in the office and you can see that one of the things that I have done that has saved my life more than anything is to have dual screens it's not a terribly expensive setup you can get an additional computer screen to hook up and a video card for fairly inexpensively so if you have the means to do so I would strongly encourage that you do this as you can see I keep my family tree maker program open it in one window and ancestry.com open in the other window and then I can just mouse back and forth between the two windows if you don't have family tree maker you can actually open up another web browser and have your online family tree here and the record search or the DNA matches or whatever on on this side so this is one of the things that I have done that has helped me more than just about anything else now we've talked we talked in the last segment about tools that are available to help you analyze and review the first of course being those shaky leaf hints just a quick review of those shaky leaf hints you're gonna find that under the filter and you're gonna select has a hint and you'll see these little leaves pop up and when I click through to any one of those it will tell me exactly how I am related to that person now when I click through to review that it'll bring up a little chart that shows me who our common ancestor is in this case it's a seventh set of seventh great-grandparents this person who took the test is a seventh cousin once-removed to my father which makes him a seventh cousin to my grandfather and that's a really clear great picture of exactly how we're related you can see here we descend from two different daughters of this couple now one of the reasons that's exciting for me is because it helps me to validate that I've been climbing up the correct family tree as we start getting back into the early 1800s and the seventh even back into the 1600s on some of these family trees this information becomes more and more difficult to obtain it also sometimes becomes a little bit more convoluted there's sometimes more confusion the the names sometimes are way more common I find as I go back further in my family tree I have a lot more common names samuel andrews very common do I have the right Samuel Andrews so DNA helps me to have confidence that I've been chasing up the correct family trees it also allows me to connect with some of these cousins so as I look at my results I showed you earlier in segment 1 a result with a gentleman who is a second cousin to my grandmother and one of the reasons that was so important to me let me change the filter view of this here one of the reasons that was so important to me was because this gentleman had actually been to the village in Germany where our common ancestor was from he had visited the church where four generations before that our common ancestors were were christened and where they were married and where they were buried and he had taken some pictures and he shared those pictures with me they were pictures that he had not uploaded to his family tree there were pictures that he just had in his private collection mostly because he was in several of those pictures of himself standing in front of the church or in the in the cemetery and he shared those pictures with me and I think that that's just a great treasure that I can now see some of the same things that my ancestors saw all because I've made this connection with this gentleman he and I are now Facebook friends and hopefully as soon as I come out of my DNA results I've spent a lot of time with them he and I'll have an opportunity to maybe share some more information about our common ancestry so that's one of the reasons those shaky leave hints are so great and one of the things that that I do with them and even if I can see how they're related I still contact these people I still want to let them know hey um you know just because I can see that we're related I want to make a connection and so I still send them a message and let them know that I've reviewed the results and that this is how I've read those results and I have some stuff to share and is there anything you'd like to share it and those communications can sometimes turn into not just great research collaboration partners but you can make lifelong friends with some of these cousins now for those for those connections where it's not really clear how you're related we're we're we can't specifically match up on your tree exactly what's going on you have to get a little bit more creative and so we have provided you with some tools to do that I'm looking for a specific match on this list here and I probably should have started so that I could have found it quickly I have all these new matches today oh I know why because I'm looking at the wrong view sort my date and once we sort by date we'll see all of my new matches from the last week that's what it sorts on the top is matches from the last seven days and then we could go ahead and view one of these new matches that I just discovered yesterday here so this person's CJ Chauncy I have no idea who she is she last logged in today that's exciting for me now we the system could not figure out how we were related and so one of the tools that we provide you is these shared surnames right and here's the caution and the and the tip that I want to give you about these shared surnames this is just a jump start right this does not mean you are connected through one of these surnames it just means hey here's some of the surnames that match in your family tree why don't you look at that and see if maybe that's how you're related and so you can click on any one of those and it will bring up you know what here's the person in their tree and here's the person in your tree and so I can look at this and I can say well my person was born and their person was born in Massachusetts so probably not an immediate connection there and you can go through those that way and make a determination we also provide you with this these maps you can hopefully you've clicked on that if not click on it and what you're gonna see is a list of common birth places in your tree now for some people in my tree all I have is Ireland I don't have a specific place in Ireland that's less helpful but for those people where I have specific locations in my tree like I have people here from Glastonbury and Hartford Connecticut it looks like they might also have people from that same place so what I can do is that I can actually zoom in on this tree and anywhere that there is an orange flag that's where people in their tree were born and anywhere there's a blue flag that's where my ancestors were born and anywhere there's a green flag it means we both have ancestors born in that same place now the reality is when you zoom in on some of these very specific places what you're gonna discover is um here's Springfield Massachusetts for example I have ancestors who were born there in 1640 and 1660 she has ancestors who are born there in 1667 1671 1700 the reality is is that for some of these communities 200 years ago there were not that many people living there 300 years ago 400 years ago there were even fewer people living there and so the reality is that they very likely intermarried or the very least knew each other so pay attention to those green flags specifically where you have an exact location match as I said those are a little bit easier to connect with and then it gives you a common starting place to start to say hey you know what okay here we're in Wethersfield Connecticut and I have in my tree and Ebenezer Keeney who was born in 1672 and she has in her tree let's get back down here to Wethersfield there we go and she hasn't her tree a Richard Keaney born in 1674 we both have somebody with the same surname born in the same place in about the same time maybe that bears looking at maybe that's where I should focus my attention to see if we're actually connected and in this case Keaney was also one of those matched surnames and so I can look at this and figure that out right so here I have a Richard Keaney born in 1674 in Wethersfield Connecticut and or she does and I have an ebony zucchini born in 1672 in Wethersfield Connecticut what are the odds that these two men are brothers or first cousins that's certainly an area of the tree where I want to look at and so I did if I come in here I can actually view her full tree so I can view it this way but we only go up to the seventh generation and so you'll notice as you scroll down here you might not see what you're looking for on the tree especially if it's back another generation or two but I can come here and I can view her pedigree chart and the first thing I want to do whenever I view anybody's pedigree chart is make sure because it always takes you to the home person on the tree I want to make sure that I'm looking at the person who took the DNA test so compare that screen with this screen so here's this DJ Chauncy person who took the test if I scroll up a little bit I can see her grandfather's name is Edwin Chauncey and so I can look here and see yep even though it's private and her father still living here's her grandfather so I'm looking at the correct person on the tree okay just keep that in mind the home person on the tree is not always the same person that took the DNA test so when you're gonna go view their tree make sure that you find that person so that you're looking at the right information now as I start looking at this tree I can look down what I do is I just quickly skim down these surnames and see if any of them look familiar in this case none of them do then I just open up these additional generations one at a time and usually I'll just jump right to this oldest generation and skim down these surnames and I'll I'll repeat that process through each of these until I come across something that looks familiar so in this case as I did that here is this Keeney surname that comes up so I'm gonna extend this generation one more time and it looks like her oldest known relative on this line is richard keaney and richard keaney was born in 1674 as I said in Wethersfield Connecticut so what I'm gonna do then is I'm gonna go to my family tree and I find it easier to do this in family tree maker it's just a lot faster than waiting for screens to load and I'm going to look up my oldest Keaney resin I'm relative in this case it's a man named Alexander Keaney who was born in 1625 in England and would you look at that he has two sons one who is my ancestor and I know that because it has a little orange arrow and his name is ebony zucchini and one who is Richard Keaney who was born in 1674 and is married to a Mary miles if you toggle back to her tray you can see Richard Keaney and Mary miles so even though we don't have a common ancestor in our tree because her tree doesn't go back one more generation with just looking at those common surnames and those common birth places I was fairly quickly able to discover exactly who our common ancestor is now she doesn't know this right and so of course I'm going to want to send her a message and let her know that I figured it out and so I would go ahead and say you know you're Richard Keaney is the younger brother of my eighth great-grandfather Ebenezer Keaney and if we have a common eighth great-grandfather that means that we are ninth cousins and isn't that exciting and then maybe I can share that information about Ebenezer with her now sometimes it's gonna go the other way in this case I have information to share with her there have been cases where I have found other people who have information that they can share with me now let me show you one other thing that I do here and again this is just a system that works for me you do what works for you I'm gonna go ahead and make a note here that we are related on the Keeney line as she's actually an eighth cousin one time removed to my father she's my ninth cousin but she's an eighth cousin one time removed to my father and just save that note okay I just made a note to myself so that as I skim through my results at a later date I know what that's all about but let me show you what I've done in Family Tree Maker that has kind of changed my life since I figured out how to do this all right so in Family Tree Maker one of the things that you can do is you can create a fact for just about anything you can come in here and you can say I want to create a fact for you know whatever so what I have done is I have created a fact for DNA connection now there's already a fact in there for diya for some DNA information but particularly I wanted to make a fact for DNA connections you'll notice I also have a fact here for their ancestry.com tree so one of the things that I did was I actually went ahead and entered the information all the way down this person's tree so until we get to her so there here is the person who is my DNA connection who came up on my match list and what I've done here in this DNA field is I have actually copied and pasted the URL for her for the match so I just I just copied this you can just right click and copy or control C either one and then I come over here and I paste that URL into her profile on my family tree maker program what that does is it allows me to find her again quickly if I come across her in my research I've done the same thing with and I do this with everybody not just with my DNA matches I've done the same thing with her tree and here's why she is actually not just the DNA match but she is the owner of the tree and so this is her tree she's the one who owns the ancestry account she's the one who's doing the research and so again I just copied the URL here of her tree and I pasted that right here into her profile in my family tree maker so I can find it quickly now one of the other things that I've done each time I find a DNA match and discover who the common ancestor is I come into this common ancestor or ancestors usually it's a couple right and under this DNA field I put the words common ancestor so that I know that I have made a DNA connection to this particular ancestor through another one of their descendants and here's one of the just the last things that I want to share with you is the power of family tree maker I love it I love database software and how manipulatable and how flexible it is I can actually come in here to this filter on my index and I can say filter in anybody where that DNA connection field contains the word common and I'm going to go ahead and click OK and it's gonna take a minute because my database is a little bit ginormous but it's gonna show me that I have 22 common ancestors and when I click OK now those 22 people show up here I could further filter that I could filter out anybody where the gender is female because all of these people are in couples right if I wanted a more manageable list and now I've just got the 11 males who are a common ancestor and as I click on each of them I can then see which of my family lines I have had further evidence for based simply on these DNA matches now you'll notice for some of them I have a lot of children that I've identified but for some of them like this Keaney fellow I only have one or two children identified and so as more DNA matches come in you know I would imagine that Evan easer and Richard probably had a younger sibling or two or five their mother didn't die until let's say their father died in 1680 so there's another six years of childbearing that could have happened in this family of course their mother was born in 1632 the couple was married in 1660 so you know she would have been in her 40s so maybe there's another older child or two I can look at that and hopefully there's another DNA match that comes along that says you know what my ancestor was also born in the 1660s in Wethersfield Connecticut and their last name is keaney and i don't know who their parents are and I can say well maybe it's this couple right because I have this really clear list now the different ancestors that have been proven out so that's just some of the ways in which I'm using both my DNA matches and my family tree maker program to just make this a really robust experience for myself there's still lots to do and some of these matches let me tell you I look at them and I have no clue but let me just I actually I'm going to share with you two more quick things I know we're way over time but there's just so much to cover here one of the things that I would recommend is that as you're looking at this list of people don't discount people who have very very small trees and here's why if I go down this list let's see if he's still in the first page he might not be oh you know I know where he is I starred in there is a gentleman who has a tree that I think only has six people in it yeah right here his tree only has six people in it but when I went and looked at it none of the names looked familiar but his name was vaguely familiar and so I pulled up my family tree maker program and sure enough he was in my family tree and that's because I had done summary search some descendency research on one of my third great-grandfather's to discover and I and I had discovered his mom and his grandfather and his grandfather had listed all the grandchildren in the obituary and so I had him actually in my tree so even though I've never met him actually I have met him now he came to a conference in Oklahoma but um but now I have this connection because because I had done some descendency research so don't discount people with small trees also as you're looking down your list of people to look at don't discount people who it says they have no family tree I don't know if this is gonna be a good example or not but let me just take a look here here's a perfect example it says they have no family tree but when I actually click through to the match what you're gonna discover is not that they don't have a family tree but that they have not yet linked their results to their tree and so I can actually come here and I can say you know what she has two trees and that's probably why she hasn't linked her results my guess is this tree is her father's family history and this trees her mother's family history and she's the one who took the test and the problem with that is yes you can only link your results to one tree at a time so one of the things that I always encourage people to do is just have one tree the beauty of the software and the beauty of the online program one of them is that it like it can handle that kind of data so you if you combine these two trees you can then link your results to one tree and people can see so if I would contact her and maybe encourage her to do that or suggest some ways that she can do that so that we can investigate how we're connected if not I can still view her family tree I can still look at results based on her father's side of the family and her mother's side of the family and try to figure out how and if were how we're connected if we can figure it out so just because somebody says they don't have a tree it just means they don't have a tree attached to their DNA results doesn't mean that there's no tree in existence just because somebody has a small tree doesn't mean that you can't figure it out and just be somebody has a locked tree doesn't mean they're not gonna be willing to share all really important points that I hope that you will remember so we've talked about shaky leave hints we talked about surname matches we talked about location matches we've talked about some ways that I use Stars and Mac and notes and even some ways that I use my Family Tree Maker system to give me a little bit more flexibility and a little bit more ability and opportunity to manipulate some of that data and pull some of that information out and then of course we've talked about the messaging system use it communicate with each other we're all in this together and you know the more that I just the more that I dig into DNA the more that I discover that that yes we're all related but we're all related in different ways and for me the excitement and the mystery and the challenge and the puzzle of it all is figuring out exactly how we're related that is believe me all we have time for today we have run so far over time but hopefully this has been useful for you I am sure you have a million questions we want to hear those questions if you are watching this live and I will be on chat in just a few minutes to help answer some of those questions if you are watching an archived version of this you have several options you can leave a comment here on the YouTube channel we do review those and we'll answer those questions as we need to you can email ask an ancestry com I probably won't respond to those individually because we get a lot of traffic on that email box but if I start to see similar questions over and over and over again it may help me prepare a future presentation one of your best bets would probably be to go either to our help and into our community our new community forum and ask some of those questions there we monitor those we have moderators on staff here that moderate that that answer some of those questions and then we also have community members who have a lot more experience and some combined knowledge that answer those questions or post a question on our Facebook page any one of those options we want you to be successful with this this ancestry DNA program like I said I'm so excited about it it's been thrilling for me to meet new cousins to make those connections I've extended my family tree two and three and four generations in some cases because I've made some of those connections so it's really fantastic fantastic experience hopefully this has been useful for you until next time this is Krista Cowen have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 182,673

Rating: 4.804348 out of 5

Keywords: ancestrydna, dna, ancestry, ancestry.com, genealogy, family tree, family search, dna test

Id: kv3_JCWUF-s

Length: 53min 2sec (3182 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2013