We are all related to little dots
I've been killing time on Ancestry, trying to come up with a topic of discussion, when duh--why not talk about recent changes to the site?
Part of why I'll go to Ancestry when I have a few minutes is because they've recently introduced a way to sort your DNA matches. You're able to put them into groups that you create, and they're different for all the people on your account, because you're not all matched with the same people. I may be descended from both mom and grandma, but they match with people I'm too far from, DNA-wise. And of course dad is not DNA matched with either of them...well, okay, that should have an asterisk, because it looks like my father's ancestors and his mother-in-law's ancestors were from the same part of Europe. I have at least one person I am DNA matched to who matches people on both sides of my family. Crazy. Wilder still is the person who matches with both someone on my father's side and someone through my grandfather, if that's believable. *mind blown*
There's long been a notes function with the various matches, and I've used that to help clue in on where someone's related. When the same usernames would come up over and over again, they'd become shorthand for how another user is related--i.e., "this user is part of the Sue McC group." Now that there is this legit group function, you can create a custom group and assign a color, with up to 24 groups possible, and without even clicking into their profiles or notes, you can see at a glance, okay, they have orange next to their name, they're in Sue McC's group. And when you click on a name where you haven't assigned them to a group yet, and you can see that they're matched with a bunch of orange people, you can assign them to Sue McC's group even if she's not a direct match, since everyone else is shared with her. It's really convenient.
The only hard part now is that I've pretty much gone through all my close matches, of which there's close to 400, and now I'm going through the farther matches, 5th-8th cousins, of which there's 16,000+. You can filter them, which helps; I am filtering by notes, since if I've seen them in the past and they were potentially relevant, I noted and starred their accounts (the stars were previously the only way to come back to one of those distant accounts anywhere near easily). Another previous thing you could do was sort by regions, parts of the world your DNA came from. I have two regions, Donegal, Ireland, plus Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Lithuania. They're specifically called Shared Migrations. I haven't found a way to search by those any longer; once there was an update, that disappeared. I'm finding people I'd noted were part of certain migrations where we didn't have any shared DNA matches, and if we still don't, I'm removing the note and letting them float off into the abyss. Some of these distant relations have been helpful in tying certain people together--oh, you're related *this* way!--and some are just too distant and I'm not going to worry about them. Again, there's over sixteen thousand matches, with more every day. I'll live without them.
It would be nice to have more than 24 groups to sort people into; I'm pretty much at my personal limit, with one space left, and I've already taken a smaller group, dispersed it, and turned it into something else. I've also revamped how I've done the other three accounts so they make more sense. I started my personal groups first, then realized it might be interesting to see how dad's matches group together, and who pops up with mom and grandma, and that sort of thing. I started with dad's since there are so few close matches with him. One set of groups is called Group: [Username], which, well, groups everyone together associated with a particular username. Clever, right? There's also Migration: [Category], since dad has the Czech one but also Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, and there's a category for people who have no migration info. Because there's basically nobody closer than 4th cousins other than immediate family, I have a category for that as well. And if someone's surname is close to ours, that got a grouping, too.
Other things that could be improved upon would be the ability to remove a filter and reset it to the full list. Right now, I have to go to a different DNA test and come back to the one I was working on in order to restore the full list. It's kind of a pain.
...Okay, my computer just crashed completely, and I'm lucky this got saved, but yeah. Ancestry is keeping things interesting and finding ways to help one better understand where they came from and to whom they're related. I'd love to get more of my relatives on here, especially dad's sisters and mom's brothers.
Part of why I'll go to Ancestry when I have a few minutes is because they've recently introduced a way to sort your DNA matches. You're able to put them into groups that you create, and they're different for all the people on your account, because you're not all matched with the same people. I may be descended from both mom and grandma, but they match with people I'm too far from, DNA-wise. And of course dad is not DNA matched with either of them...well, okay, that should have an asterisk, because it looks like my father's ancestors and his mother-in-law's ancestors were from the same part of Europe. I have at least one person I am DNA matched to who matches people on both sides of my family. Crazy. Wilder still is the person who matches with both someone on my father's side and someone through my grandfather, if that's believable. *mind blown*
There's long been a notes function with the various matches, and I've used that to help clue in on where someone's related. When the same usernames would come up over and over again, they'd become shorthand for how another user is related--i.e., "this user is part of the Sue McC group." Now that there is this legit group function, you can create a custom group and assign a color, with up to 24 groups possible, and without even clicking into their profiles or notes, you can see at a glance, okay, they have orange next to their name, they're in Sue McC's group. And when you click on a name where you haven't assigned them to a group yet, and you can see that they're matched with a bunch of orange people, you can assign them to Sue McC's group even if she's not a direct match, since everyone else is shared with her. It's really convenient.
The only hard part now is that I've pretty much gone through all my close matches, of which there's close to 400, and now I'm going through the farther matches, 5th-8th cousins, of which there's 16,000+. You can filter them, which helps; I am filtering by notes, since if I've seen them in the past and they were potentially relevant, I noted and starred their accounts (the stars were previously the only way to come back to one of those distant accounts anywhere near easily). Another previous thing you could do was sort by regions, parts of the world your DNA came from. I have two regions, Donegal, Ireland, plus Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Lithuania. They're specifically called Shared Migrations. I haven't found a way to search by those any longer; once there was an update, that disappeared. I'm finding people I'd noted were part of certain migrations where we didn't have any shared DNA matches, and if we still don't, I'm removing the note and letting them float off into the abyss. Some of these distant relations have been helpful in tying certain people together--oh, you're related *this* way!--and some are just too distant and I'm not going to worry about them. Again, there's over sixteen thousand matches, with more every day. I'll live without them.
It would be nice to have more than 24 groups to sort people into; I'm pretty much at my personal limit, with one space left, and I've already taken a smaller group, dispersed it, and turned it into something else. I've also revamped how I've done the other three accounts so they make more sense. I started my personal groups first, then realized it might be interesting to see how dad's matches group together, and who pops up with mom and grandma, and that sort of thing. I started with dad's since there are so few close matches with him. One set of groups is called Group: [Username], which, well, groups everyone together associated with a particular username. Clever, right? There's also Migration: [Category], since dad has the Czech one but also Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, and there's a category for people who have no migration info. Because there's basically nobody closer than 4th cousins other than immediate family, I have a category for that as well. And if someone's surname is close to ours, that got a grouping, too.
Other things that could be improved upon would be the ability to remove a filter and reset it to the full list. Right now, I have to go to a different DNA test and come back to the one I was working on in order to restore the full list. It's kind of a pain.
...Okay, my computer just crashed completely, and I'm lucky this got saved, but yeah. Ancestry is keeping things interesting and finding ways to help one better understand where they came from and to whom they're related. I'd love to get more of my relatives on here, especially dad's sisters and mom's brothers.