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AncestryDNA’s new BETA

Pauline said:
To some extent, but not as much as yours. I’m OK up to 2x great grandparents, then I have 3 replaced 3x gt grandparents. For the 4x and 5x greats I have quite a few replaced ancestors, almost half of the 5x.

But I’m faring a lot better than my brother in law who still has a replacement for his mother, and consequently no maternal ancestors showing at all.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I hope that means that things are generally moving the right way. Perhaps the error for your brother in law’s mother will disappear leaving lots of good hints in earlier generations...

I have seen a few cases now where the information is good. I know that some people have made their trees unsearchable though.
 
Having my first look at ThruLines, the problem I have is with an illegitimate child.
ThruLines wants to give me a Private father, who they suggest "I may not be related to any DNA matches through Private."
It looks as if he is the man that the mother married 12 years after my illegitimate ancestor was born.
This also means that his ancesters keep on cropping up further back in my ThruLines.
Like numerous posts above, I would like the option to ignore this addition.
Hopefully I will also find some useful information.
 
Katie Bee said:
Having my first look at ThruLines, the problem I have is with an illegitimate child.
Click to expand...
I have a similar situation with an illegitimate ancestor, where ThruLines has installed a later spouse of the mother. In my case, he is taken from my linked tree, where I have clearly indicated that he is not the father of my ancestor (who I show as having unknown father). The 3 DNA matches showing as descended from this step-ancestor are all descended from his wife's illegitimate daughter, so they are genuine cousins but shouldn't show as descended from him.

I have another illegitimate ancestor whose mother later married, but for some reason this later spouse (again in my linked tree) is not included in ThruLines, and the DNA match from this one correctly shows a 'half' cousin descended from the mother's later marriage.

I'm not sure why these are treated differently by ThruLines, as the situation seems the same from both.

I agree, it would be useful to have an 'ignore' button for these spurious 'ancestors'. In the meantime, just ignore them and concentrate on those descended from your actual ancestors.

Edit: Forgot to mention, I have another 'step-parent' included in my ThruLines who shouldn't be there. He is a 2nd husband where I am descended from the first husband. Both husbands are in ThruLines, and the wife is there twice!
 
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I'm thrilled with ThruLines it has solved my long standing brickwall concerning my gg grandmother, Anna Giblett. I have DNA links to 5 other cousins who share my 4th great-grandparents and this proves that my genetic link passes through Anna who I now know is a daughter of the Giblett family of Meare and not a foster child.
Cheers.
kiwilong.
 
PhoebeW said:
Has anyone else seen their ThruLines become far more accurate?
Click to expand...
Mine is a bit better, certainly up to and including 2x great grandparents - now complete with no replacements. But I still have replaced and missing ancestors further up: 1 replaced and 1 missing 3x great grandparents; 3 replaced 4x g-grandparents; 3 replaced and 5 missing 5x g-grandparents (some but not all as a result of replacements further down). This is in addition to the wrong spouses I mentioned before, which still remain. Not as bad as Pauline has found, but enough to be irritating.
 
Mine also does look slightly more accurate, although my first unknown ancestor is at 2x Great grandparent level as my great-grandfather was illegitimate (They've added in a "potential ancestor" for him). From there, there aren't any mistakes in the 3x set, other than those who are missing (re: my illegitimate great-grandfather's unknown paternal branch).

It starts going strange at 4x level - with a potential ancestor labelled "Dead End" (who puts anyone in as "Dead End"??), one potential I'm fairly sure I have in my tree, a second unknown question mark as I have yet to find a particular set of parents (next on the brick wall list), a still incorrect set who the wonders of this forum helped me disprove and correct (though it's not corrected in most people's trees yet) and a number of other interesting additions.

I am not certain of all of my 5x great grandparents, so that's the point it gets really interesting, as there is still an addition of one who can't be my ancestor as he lived his entire life in the US, and the person he is supposed to be parent of was born and died in the UK, and appears on pretty much every census! (Though it would be interesting to search that tree to see if I could find the possible cross over).
 
jorghes said:
I am not certain of all of my 5x great grandparents
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60 of my 5x great-grandparents are unknown, plus I have 16 unknown 4x great grandparents and a couple at 3x level (parents of my Irish 2x g-grandfather). ThruLines has suggested 22 'potential ancestors' to fill the gaps (15 at 5x and 7 at 4x levels). Most of these seem very unlikely to be my ancestors (wrong place, wrong year, wrong family and in one case wrong name). A few appear plausible but have very limited information and need more research. The only 'new' cousin showing as a result of these ThruLines additions is one from a false ancestor.

These 'potential ancestors' are fine - even if they are wrong they are not stopping me seeing the links to actual cousins from ancestors in my tree, and may lead to new discoveries. On the other hand, the replacement or omission of the 13 actual ancestors from my tree (as mentioned in my last post) stops me seeing links to cousins from those ancestors via ThruLines.

One positive from a new cousin (M) I found via ThruLines. From M's tree I can see that - as well as being my 4th cousin - he is a 3rd cousin of another contact (K). From our trees, K and I could see we are 4th cousins but we had no DNA match. However, as M is a DNA match with both K and me, that provides the DNA link, albeit indirectly. I suppose this is the principle on which 'DNA Circles' worked previously? Not that I was ever in a DNA circle!
 
It is surprising how quickly my new matches are being indexed with the common ancestor indicator now. That’s quite promising. But some of the new common ancestor hints seem to be triggering new potential ancestors to replace known ancestors.
 
Thanks for all of the interesting comments. I have just received my DNA results. A couple of comments mention a stripped down DNA gedcom on FTAnalyzer. I have FTAnalyzer but don’t see how I get a stripped down version. How do I do that?
 
In FTAnalyser click the Export tab at the top, then Minimalist DNA GEDCOM from the list.
Then for Ancestry answer 'No' to the first question about making living people Private.
Ancestry does that automatically and will not use your Family tree in DNA matching or ThruLines, if you answer Yes.
Have fun
 
Looking at my ThruLines today, I am pleased to see that I now have NO replaced ancestors at all! All ancestors from my tree have been reinstated, including all those who were previously replaced and those who were just missing (as mentioned in #186). Also, the step-ancestors have gone (with one exception), and some known cousins who were not showing (for no apparent reason) now appear in ThruLines. The result isn't perfect, as I now have some cousins apparently descended from a false sibling of our common ancestor (making some 3rd cousins appear as 4th cousins, 4th as 5th etc), and a couple of DNA matches with 'common ancestors' are not showing in ThruLines, but it is much better than it was.

Have others found their ThruLines similarly improved?
 
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Is anyone unable to log on to Thrulines? It worked yesterday, but it won’t open now. I logged out of Ancestry and logged back in, but it still won’t open.
 
Ancestry have just launched a new version of the user profile page (there is a toggle at the top right of your profile).

Something else I just learned is that providing a profile picture greatly increases the chance that someone will reply to your messages. And apparently this applies even if it isn't a portrait of the user.....
 
Helen7 said:
Have others found their ThruLines similarly improved?
Click to expand...
Today I find that my ThruLines has now improved also, with several ancestors now having the correct spouse/partner returned to them, and my absent 5 x great grandfather has come back. There are still a few oddities but the list of ancestors is now a lot more correct and complete that it was.

And at long last my brother in law's ThruLines is displaying his correct mother instead of a replacement, and as a result he is now showing some maternal ancestry.
 
Pauline said:
Today I find that my ThruLines has now improved also
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Mine too.
I had a problem with my 3x great grandmother. Thrulines changed her to her husbands 2nd wife's mother.
I sorted that out as it was using my sister in law's tree to give me the wrong grandmother.
In one of the census returns my 2x great grandfather entered his mother in law as 'mother' and his second wife had the same forename as his first wife.
So it was an easy mistake to make if you did not look any further.
Then ThruLines took away my 3x great grandmother completely.
Then it replaced her with a Private Living person - so I have no idea who that was supposed to be at 200+ years old.
Now my actual 3x great grandmother from my family tree is back safe and sound.
I wonder how long it will last?
 
I’m seeing a real improvement today too.

My missing 3xgreat-grandfather is back and I have no replacement ancestors any more.

I do have ten suggested ancestors and most of them are fair enough as they do appear in the trees of people who are actually tracing my family. Six of the entries are good suggestions but I’m not convinced. The other four are wrong and might be filtered out by a tightening of the algorithm. But that’s just nit-picking. Overall I’m surprised how well this works.

Did I intervene? Yes, but only a little - and I’m not sure if that caused the change. What I have done is to build some bridges from my trees to reach the trees of some of my matches. As a result I have about six new common ancestor hints in my list of DNA matches (beta).

But with 46,000+ matches, it is still a little diappointing that there are only sixty odd common ancestor hints in my list of DNA matches.
 
PhoebeW said:
But with 46,000+ matches, it is still a little diappointing that there are only sixty odd common ancestor hints in my list of DNA matches.
Click to expand...
But not necessarily surprising, given that most of your genetic cousins are so distantly-related (see the table in my Masterclass) that it's very unlikely that the common ancestors will appear in both trees. A typical match will be with an 8th cousin, and even the most experienced of researchers won't know who most of their 512 7G grandparents are. I certainly don't!

Out of my nearly 20,000 matches 44 are shown as having common ancestors (though the figure on the front page is only 12). The fact that you have many more matches than me doesn't necessarily mean that you will have a lot more cousins with shared ancestors - it depends whether the higher number of matches is a result of larger families or endogamy (or a mixture of both)..
 
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