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ANCESTRY TREES AND DNA - A PLEA

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Hardwork
Posts: 86
Joined: 14 Jun 2020, 14:15

ANCESTRY TREES AND DNA - A PLEA

Post by Hardwork »

I'm probably preaching to the converted here but I have a plea to those having Ancestry trees and or use Ancestry DNA testing.

Though many people use their Ancestry trees to record as many of their relatives as possible, for those trying to find relatives through DNA many of the very large trees are extremely time consuming to navigate, as is searching for all possible surname matches. Therefore it would be very helpful if people also have a separate tree displayed that comprises (just surnames if preferred) of only their direct lineage, as that is what any DNA will link to ultimately, false paternities excepted.

For those using Ancestry DNA testing; please upload your results to Gedmatch or another testing company. Ancestry do not provide the data required (as yet) to see which segments or on which chromosomes matches occur, which is often essential to try to establish which family branches and surnames may be involved in the match, particularly where the tester has no tree attached to their results.
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Guy
Posts: 135
Joined: 01 Jun 2020, 19:14
Location: Wakefield
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Re: ANCESTRY TREES AND DNA - A PLEA

Post by Guy »

I have almost the opposite problem and wish that people would add as many people as possible to their trees, I keep looking at trees and find only a few individuals, often less than 10, on them far to few to find the common ancestor.
I do of course realise these people have probably only started family history possible as a result of the DNA test.
We must however think why is that tree on line, is it a tree that has been generated over many years (even before DNA tests were available) for a person to record their ancestry and therefore contains many branches or is it like many of these small trees an effort to find a connection through DNA?
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Guy
As we have gained from the past, we owe the future a debt, which we pay by sharing today.
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AdrianBruce
Posts: 358
Joined: 14 Jun 2020, 18:57
Location: South Cheshire

Re: ANCESTRY TREES AND DNA - A PLEA

Post by AdrianBruce »

Hardwork wrote: 03 Aug 2020, 11:01... Therefore it would be very helpful if people also have a separate tree displayed that comprises (just surnames if preferred) of only their direct lineage, as that is what any DNA will link to ultimately, false paternities excepted. ...
That doesn't follow to me - if I have dropped a line down to a 3rd cousin, who happens to match the brick wall on somebody else's tree, there is a decent match for Ancestry's Thrulines to find, with only one tree / tree transition. Whereas if I chop that branch off, Thrulines won't find it - at least not thru my research.

If you're suggesting that the DNA links to the full tree and the direct lineage is just a navigation aid, I find that a horizontal pedigree view on the full tree, from the root person, is reasonably useful - no it doesn't show everything, but it shows as much as the shorn tree would.
Adrian Bruce
Hardwork
Posts: 86
Joined: 14 Jun 2020, 14:15

Re: ANCESTRY TREES AND DNA - A PLEA

Post by Hardwork »

Guy; Trees with too few entries, sometimes only one, are also a problem, I agree. I’m not advocating people scrap their large trees by any means. I realise that that is where they store their genealogy. My point is it would be helpful to also have a tree just showing direct ancestry and labelled as such. If, say, I have 20 surnames in my direct tree from a certain county (and most of my ancestry is from one county), and I want to search members’ trees, for those names within that county, it isn’t easy and is extremely time consuming to search each name on each tree, especially if one eventually discovers these surnames only feature as very remote cousins or their spouses and have quite tenuous links to the tree compiler, which often seems to be the case. Some people even have twigs that don’t appear to connect at all to the body of the tree.

Adrian; I am not talking of searching from Ancestry DNA matches, where there is an immediate link to the tree in horizontal format. I am talking about searching trees direct from the search facility for public trees. These trees may be displayed by people who have not have taken Ancestry DNA tests. It is searching those is difficult and time consuming. Searching for a surname, in say a village location, often brings up many trees, but frequently containing people who are not direct blood relatives of the tree owner. My modus operandi is to offer to pay for tests of people who link into my tree but for the reasons given above, currently this can be far too time consuming to search trees for, especially as the genealogy needs to be checked too, as far as possible. Having a tree of direct ancestors would help dismiss many trees immediately, straight from the tree search facility, if one was only searching trees with direct ancestors of the tree owner.
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