Why are you even looking at your own matches if your mother and father have both tested? Surely you should be looking at their matches - your matches should be a subset of their matches, and any matches you have which aren't included in your parents' matches are extremely likely to be spurious.
Almost always, in fact.
Do you mean before last August? I didn't notice any problems between getting my DNA results in May and writing the Masterclass 3 months later.
Yes, I got my results in June last year, & I noticed fairly early on that searches weren't always finding matches I expected to show up in the list of results. I suspect this may have been mainly down to the limitations of this search, though sometimes it seemed like something else might be amiss.
That's right - I hardly ever specify a place as well as a name. When I do it's usually a country, or occasionally a county. I'm very aware of the limitations.
Except that, when searching trees generally, you can specify locations other than birth places, and you can refine your search in other ways too. With the DNA search, specifying a country may be sufficient to bring the results down to a more manageable level (though sometimes more specific is needed), but it still won't pick up those for whom a birth place hasn't been entered.
Even though we don't know the precise birthplace of our relative we can usually be pretty certain about the country, perhaps even the county.
Yes absolutely jorghes and will follow through as you say. Thanks
I guess it goes against the grain to enter an assumed date or place of birth (however broadly defined) into my tree, as it was always somewhat frowned upon to do so - too reminiscent of IGI submissions etc. And with surnames like Price and Jones in my tree I might add England as the assumed birthplace only to later discover it was actually Wales.
Agreed, though how often it is necessary to include a birthplace will vary from person to person, depending on how may matches, and how many common surnames, they have.
I wasn't suggesting you enter that information in your own tree - only that when you search that you use the country or county to filter the results - when this is necessary.
I get 95 results when I search my 11,600 matches for the surname Smith without any geographical restriction - that's a perfectly manageable number. If I switch to my wife's test (she has Welsh ancestry) I get 129 results for Jones out of nearly 18,000 matches.
Which relies on other people having done what I wouldn’t want to do myself.
No it doesn't! They could have entered a more precise place which is within the county or country you specify.
It’s all rather academic at present, anyway, because getting back on topic, the search doesn’t seem to be working properly. If I search my matches for Smith I get around 150 results. Adding in England as a location reduces the list to about 60. When I add in a county the list reduces substantially but when I check the results something has gone wrong.
If it consistently worked like that you would get more results, not fewer. In the last 24 hours I've systematically worked through the first 70 surnames in my list, and on the rare occasions that I added a birthplace it always reduced the number of results.
Isn't that a different problem - to do with the way that Ancestry parse the birthplace information and matches it against their gazetteer?
