Should this shared match be treated as a genuine link?

[lesear]

First of all, thank you for accepting my invitation to join the forum. I am new to this but will do my best to follow the correct procedures.

Since obtaining my Ancestry DNA results about 18 months ago I have been slowly plodding through all my connections, colour coding into four main groups but with several small groupings which so far I have been unable to find a link to my trees. I have worked my way down to 11 cM. My main groups and numbers are :

Father : paternal - 241 (in case of queries, I posted here in error trying to tab)
Father : maternal - 116

Mother : paternal - 58
Mother : maternal - 81

However, the exception is a large unknown group of 219 shared matches (my blue group). This consists so far of about 40 fourth cousins ranging from 27 cM. They are all in the USA and very few have manageable trees - if trees exist at all they are in the thousands. I have tried to contact a couple but no reply.

A couple of weeks ago I had a shared match, someone in the 12 cM range was linked both to a person in the blue group and a person in my father's paternal group. The great great grandfather of this latter person migrated to the USA with his young family in the late 1800's. However, I do wonder whether quite so many blue group cousins could eminate from such a recent migration?

My daughter is a shared match with a few of the blues, but my paternal cousin and her daughter do not appear to feature at all so I had it in the back of my mind that this group was my mother's side. I do find now that 95% of any shared matches I am getting this far down the line are with someone in the blue group.

Do I treat this single match as a genuine answer to my problem? Am I wasting too much time trying to find an answer? It is all absorbing when perhaps I should be worrying more about the loss of the 6-7 cMs.

 

[peter]

A couple of weeks ago I had a shared match, someone in the 12 cM range was linked both to a person in the blue group and a person in my father's paternal group. The great great grandfather of this latter person migrated to the USA with his young family in the late 1800's. However, I do wonder whether quite so many blue group cousins could eminate from such a recent migration?

It's not impossible - but also consider the possibility that other family members also migrated.

My daughter is a shared match with a few of the blues, but my paternal cousin and her daughter do not appear to feature at all.

Do you have access to your cousins DNA matches, or are you relying on her showing up as a shared match?

You would probably get better results for less effort if you followed the advice in the Masterclass - this is particularly important given the changes due shortly.

 

[lesear]

Sorry - my complete post is missing. Will look for it and start again

 

[lesear]

Might get the hang of this one day! Latched on to your second reply and thought you had only seen my last paragraph.

I do have access to the DNA results of my paternal cousin's daughter and have checked with a few of the names within the blue group with no matches shown as a result. Had another look through the Masterclass yesterday but I decided that I was following it pretty well for this particular situation. As you suggest, maybe other members of the family had emigrated to the USA in previous generations and the results I am seeing are from a big DNA cauldron out of which the one known cousin has finally emerged.

If I add these 215 results to my father's paternal side, it will mean I am very much a child of that branch of the family.

Thank you.

 

[Heather]

Might get the hang of this one day! Latched on to your second reply and thought you had only seen my last paragraph.

Hi lesear, welcome to the forum. If you are replying to a posting (as Peter did to yours) If you click on "reply with quote" within the posting you are answering, the whole posting will appear in the box where you can answer it. You can delete part of the posting that is not relevant to your answer, as I have done in answer to your posting, BUT you must make sure that you do not delete any part of the posting that is within the brackets at the beginning of the post or the last bit of the post eg [/QUOTE] as this part of the post will be displayed above your answer, I hope that this helps.

 

[peter]

If I add these 215 results to my father's paternal side, it will mean I am very much a child of that branch of the family.

I'm not sure what you intend that to mean but we don't inherit an equal amount of DNA from our four grandparents (though we do inherit half from each couple).

However the number of matches we get are inevitably swayed by cousins who emigrated to the New World, partly because people in those countries are more likely to take DNA tests, and partly because people who arrived in the New World often married people - but mainly because they had larger families, and the greater natural resources allowed more of the children to survive to adulthood.

I suggest you abandon your current path and follow the tried and tested strategies in the Masterclass - it'll save you an enormous amount of time and make things much easier, both in the short-term and the long-term. And it's especially important now, with up to half of your matches about to disappear.

 

[lesear]

I apologise if I misled you, Peter. It was written in jest as people always used to say that I "was my father's daughter" when I was young - meaning I was so like him. I have already searched by family names and areas of birth and shall, of course, continue and especially to concentrate on the denominations we are about to lose. This also includes periodically rechecking to trawl new additions to my list of cousins into the net.

Again, thank you for your advice.

 

[lesear]

Hi lesear, welcome to the forum. If you are replying to a posting (as Peter did to yours) If you click on "reply with quote" within the posting you are answering, the whole posting will appear in the box where you can answer it. You can delete part of the posting that is not relevant to your answer, as I have done in answer to your posting, BUT you must make sure that you do not delete any part of the posting that is within the brackets at the beginning of the post or the last bit of the post as this part of the post will be displayed above your answer, I hope that this helps.

Many thanks for this advice, Heather. Must admit I did get rather frazzled yesterday especially when I lost my draft attempting to tab!

Lesley

 

[Helen7]

If you click on "reply with quote" within the posting you are answering, the whole posting will appear in the box where you can answer it. You can delete part of the posting that is not relevant to your answer, as I have done in answer to your posting,

Or you can select just the text you want to quote and click on “+ Quote” and then “Insert quote” into your post. That way you don’t have to delete anything.

 

[lesear]

Or you can select just the text you want to quote and click on “+ Quote” and then “Insert quote” into your post. That way you don’t have to delete anything.

Thanks, Helen. I appreciate your example to illustrate your tip.