As you scroll down the Ancestry Match List page, you’ll eventually see a “Distant Cousin” marker. This is the Ancestry Distant Cousin Threshold. Matches above the mark are what Ancestry calls 4th-6th cousins (and closer). Matches below the mark are what they consider to be “Distant Cousins”. The Ancestry Distant Cousin threshold is 20 centimorgans. … Read more

Here’s a tip on avoiding a particular display issue with Ancestry when using Chrome. The problem of the spinning wheel started occurring for me in October. The little wheel kept spinning, and the page of match lists would not scroll and display properly. I followed the usual Ancestry instructions to clear down cache to no … Read more

As of late October 2018, Ancestry have released another new display feature on the Match List page: a row below each match displays the number of shared centimorgans and segments. This should be a real time saver when reviewing matches by scanning the page. In combination with the other new feature I posted about, the “no … Read more

Ancestry added a very useful new feature to the main list of matches at some time in September/October 2018. I’m being vague on the timeline because not all Ancestry users get the same new features at the same time. We now see a new tree description toward the right hand side of the page: “Unlinked … Read more

Up to now, I hadn’t paid much attention to Ancestry match gender. This post is a deep dive into how it breaks down. When I first took a snapshot of my Ancestry match data, I didn’t bother taking every piece of information available. For example, I didn’t think that the kit administrator info was useful … Read more

I conducted a review in May 2018 of all my DNA matches on Ancestry and recorded whether the match had a public or private tree, and whether a tree was linked to their DNA. I ran the same review three months later in August 2018, having seen an additional 15 hundred matches added during that … Read more

This post follows on from my May 2018 analysis of the rate of growth of my DNA matches on Ancestry between July 2017 and May 2018. I took another snapshot of all my DNA matches in August 2018. I’m interested in capturing: THE RATE OF GROWTH OF MATCHES THE DISTRIBUTION OF MATCHES BY SHARED CM … Read more

For some of the posts on this blog I’ll be using one way to measure the similarity of two sample sets of data. The statistic is called the Jaccard Index, or the Jaccard Similarity Coefficient. This post is a technical explanation of the calculation itself. The sets of data are the unique ancestral surnames of … Read more

In May 2018 I downloaded the direct line ancestral surnames of all my DNA matches at Ancestry. I discussed some statistical analysis on the numbers in a previous post. I then conducted some exploratory data mining of the distribution of surnames across my matches. My paternal line is African (not African-American), and I have very … Read more

Previously I discussed an analysis of the availability of trees across all my DNA matches. The headline figures from May 2018 were 40% of my matches had a public linked tree 27% had no linked tree but had at least one public unlinked tree 7% had a private tree 26% had no tree A total … Read more