The Small Matches at Ancestry are Gone!

Aug31

The genealogy airwaves have been burning with discussions about losing DNA matches with less than 8 cM shared at Ancestry. For my own family there is no loss, but I feel for those who were impacted. If the site responds faster and better then it was worth it in my opinion. Who can look through some 25,000 matches anyway?

To see how many matches you have left click on the Shared DNA in the list of filters as shown below with my added red arrow.

Personally I happened to save 72 of my small matches because I had made a note or grouped them with a colored dot. These included 35 with common ancestors who were grouped; I always group matches with shared ancestors. Whether the shared DNA is actually from those common ancestors is unclear. The half of them from my endogamous Norwegian area may well not be, but the others are probably good.

I liked the suggestion a reader made in a comment on another post that suggested Ancestry look for common ancestors and if found, keep these small matches. I wonder how hard that would be to do for new matches.

To see my remaining small matches I tried entering a minimum size of 6 and a maximum of 8 but that did not work at all well since all the matches of 8 plus a fraction showed up. So I had to use 7 for the high number as shown below with my added red arrow.

I had collected some statistics for me, my brother, and my tested cousins before the change and added the new numbers just now to look at the differences.
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Ancestry and the Longest Segment

Aug30

All the DNA testing companies, except Ancestry, show you a chromosome map of the segments you share with a DNA match. For the casual user those maps, called chromosome browsers, may not be of interest. However those of us with intermarried families among our ancestors (endogamy) need to see the segments in common in order to know if a match is a findable relative who shares large chunks of DNA with us or just someone who shares multiple distant ancestors. Third cousins and closer family will always share some large segments, at least 20 or 30 centimorgans and even larger for closer relatives (see Blaine’s chart below).

Ancestry now shows the longest segment on a DNA match’s profile page which could be very useful to help decide which matches to pursue and which ones to ignore.

A known fourth cousin on my Norwegian line with some endogamy, notice how much larger his largest segment is than the size of the match

A word of warning, the size of the largest segment that they show is uncut, that is it is listed before they remove matching DNA that is expected to be population specific. For example, many of my one segment matches show a longest segment that is larger than the match size as shown above! If you click on the longest segment number there is a very informative popup about relationships and segments that includes this statement:

“In some cases, the length of the longest shared segment is greater than the total length of shared DNA. This is because we adjust the length of shared DNA to reflect DNA that is most likely shared from a recent ancestor. Sometimes, DNA can be shared for reasons other than recent ancestry, such as when two people share the same ethnicity or are from the same regions.”

A Jewish match not to pursue, likely related many times since the largest segment is 15

My often requested advice for Ashkenazi Jewish researchers is to look for one segment greater than 20cM and another greater than 10cM plus several others in order for a DNA match to be recently related enough to find the common ancestor(s). Therefore it would be even better if Ancestry showed the two largest segments. Subtracting the largest segment from the total to figure out the sizes of the other segments is not very accurate since the total is adjusted by removing population specific sections (Timber algorithm) while the largest is not.

Blaine Bettinger includes the longest segment in his DNA statistics collection form and below is a chart of those 2015 results by cousin level; click here for his blog post.

Chart of longest segment statistics collected by Blaine Bettinger. Click it for the full article

I spent some time looking at the cases where matches are tested at both Ancestry and 23andme in my family’s results.

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Attended My First Virtual Conference: Success!

Aug16

I learned much more than usual from my first completely online conference, the 2020 IAJGS conference on Jewish Genealogy. Perhaps because there were fewer distractions: no seat-mates, no deciding on where to dine, no exhibit hall, and that I was only doing one presentation. Although it may have been because I had a purpose: to learn how to research my husband’s Polish roots. Or maybe with fewer talks, they were just very high quality ones, aside from a few technical glitches.

from the top right, me, my brother Shipley Munson (moderator), and Adam Brown (Y DNA expert)

Actually the online format is better in many ways. I can play and replay the talks easily and take screen shots for myself of key points. There were many more questions and answers plus people could chat both privately and publicly with each other, I also really like the many excellent on demand videos on specific topics which I am still working through.

I asked my friend Heather how it went for her and she said “I especially appreciate knowing the names of the audience while listening to talks. More valuable than being there in person and perhaps only meeting the person next to me. Makes it easier to figure out who has common interests.” She also said, ” It was cool to be able to chat and make contact (share email addresses) while the talk was going on without bothering the speaker or my seat-mates.”

So what went badly? I personally never figured out the exhibit hall replacement. I missed the excitement of the live hall and seeing what was new from the various vendors. I would have loved a few small zoom-style break-out sessions on common interests where I could see everyone’s faces while chatting. However, much to my surprise, I actually preferred being at a virtual conference.

Now for a little follow up on our Chat with the Jewish DNA Experts session.
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My First Virtual Conference Starts Monday

Aug8

I love presenting at genealogy conferences and mingling with others equally devoted to family history. I also really enjoy visiting the exhibit hall, chatting with vendors, and seeing what’s new. I am not sure how well that will work in an online environment but I am about to find out.

This coming week is the 40th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. It was originally going to be here in San Diego, on Harbor Island, but now it is virtual, using a package called BigMarker. Click here for the IAJGS press release. I will be doing a live session called Ask the Experts About Jewish DNA with Adam Brown on Tuesday at 2:15 PST (5:15 EST).

For the originally planned San Diego conference, I was going to do a talk on dealing with Jewish endogamy in your autosomal DNA test results (click here for those slides), as well as tell a quick story about discovering via DNA that I have third cousins in South Africa (click here for that blog post), but those talks were cut when they went to the online format. So I will give a very brief summary of the endogamy issue in our Ask the Experts session or, if you want to know more, come talk to me at my “table” after that session. Click here to see my slide advising which Jewish matches to follow up on.

The pre-recorded, thus on demand, talks start tomorrow (Sunday) for conference attendees. I plan to listen to the one about South Africa now that I have relatives there.

I have been getting most of my information through the IAJGS facebook group for the conference. Recently they explained how to submit questions in advance, as follows: Continue reading →

My Thoughts on the Changes at Ancestry

Aug1

Drop down menu from messages icon top right, red arrow added by me

The changes to my messages on Ancestry are more of a problem for me than the upcoming changes to small matches. Most of the major bloggers have weighed in with their opinions about Ancestry removing matches of less than 8 cM to people not starred, grouped, or messaged. So I will list some of those articles at the end of this one. Fortunately the date for this change has been moved from early August to late August.

Personally I do not have a strong opinion about small segments. For my family, those matches are not at all useful, so I pay them no attention. About half of them rate to be false matches anyway, although Ancestry has good algorithms for phasing, making more of them real than elsewhere. However I do understand that small matches can be important to people looking into deeper ancestry. Note that I have never used those very small matches even when solving unknown parentage cases.

The other upcoming changes to segment information like showing the size of the largest segment and using decimals for the centimorgans (cM) instead of rounding to the nearest whole number are clear improvements. [UPDATE 30-Aug-2020: the longest segment is here. Click here for my blog post about it.]

However my messages, carefully filed into 50 folders, have just been converted to the new system months after everyone else’s. One major annoyance is that every message thread was suddenly marked unread, all 64 of them! I had previously read almost all of them (only 4 listed unread on my icon). At least they gave me the option to download my old folders of messages.

My Messages look like this now, red arrow is my addition