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General => Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing => Topic started by: GailB on Wednesday 02 July 25 01:45 BST (UK)
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Just noticed that I now have Ancestry clusters. Very disappointing at the moment because I only have two clusters, one paternal and one maternal. They are still working on it though so I hope to see a vast improvement.
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I expect a lot of head scratching and questions from people when it rolls out, if it's anything like MH then a lot of matches will be excluded as they won't meet the criteria needed but we will have to wait and see how well Ancestry explain it (if they explain it at all).
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From what I remember reading the instructions from the first time I opened it, to be included matches are over 65cM who match at least 20cM with each other.
What I have noticed from checking the 16 accounts I have DNA access to is that immediate family are omitted - parent/child, full and half siblings etc. Aunt/uncle and nephew/niece, first cousins are included.
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I wasn't expecting it to be a game changer given my matches and with just 27 matches above 65cM it's unlikely to make much difference to me. My tree will always be a headache no matter what tools and features come out so I try to be realistic and not be reliant on them for breakthroughs.
MH only include matches between 30-400cM who share a minimum of 35cM with each other
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Some users may not get this feature until December 2025
https://support.ancestry.com.au/s/article/Science-of-Matches-by-Cluster
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Almost makes me wonder if the longest nights being in the southern hemisphere right now, the release of a new protools feature and protools costing money are connected in some way. ;)
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I have just checked and I also have the new clusters feature. This is my result.
" We're sorry, we couldn't cluster your matches - This may because you don't have enough matches yet. You can try again as more people take DNA tests.".
I have over 28,000 matches! The reason for this is more likely to be , as Glen has suggested , the nature of my matches not meeting their criteria. My highest match is 128cM.
(I did transfer my ancestry kit to MH where I have 9 clusters. To be honest I have not found them that helpful!).
William
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We do not have it as yet.
The image is of the clusters from the My Heritage account that we used to have.
It was totally useless, the large cluster has zero useful matches that could only be resolved by considerable more time and effort than I am prepared to undertake.
The 3 DNA “Cousins” that I found were on MH are in the Light Blue cluster at the bottom right, all the others in this cluster are unresolved due to lack of useful information that was available about each of them, not that there were many. There are only two other DNA matches in this Group which sort of makes it pretty useless as in Ancestry this is my Irish Group which is 100 strong who share 20cM and greater with me and there are hundreds of them in total who I have yet to include in the Coloured Groupings.
If as I suspect Ancestry continues to allow Nicknames as displayed user names together with no basic information about the person then Clusters will not likely to be of great value.
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Here is a link to the Ancestry blog about this new feature:
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/c/ancestry-blog/dna/dna-matches-by-cluster?srsltid=AfmBOooaMyjqiDtcgFCaVBSRtlqZaS3j4Z5umf1pE8XuPFY7LDFrhvdm
One quote from it caught my eye " If you do not have many matches sharing 65cM of DNA with you, then it will not work, and it will not place any matches labelled "Unassigned" into a cluster."
Well that explains why I have no clusters and am not likely to have any in the future - I only have 6 matches of 65 cM and above and 4 of those are unassigned! ( As it happens the 4 are all close matches with each other and I know what the connection is. Quite why they are unassigned is yet another issue!).
I hope others fare rather better!
William
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I imagine at least one of the US based youtube channels will give it the usual glowing report when they have access and wait a few days for the fuss to die down before adding the heart/like to comments highlighting the flaws and drawbacks.
Looking into my crystal ball I can see a lot of disappointed and confused people thinking it's an easy 'one click' way to automatically group matches while completely missing the fact that the upper limit of 1300cM will exclude full & half sibs, grandparents, aunts/uncles, nieces/nephews and possibly some very high 1c matches from the reports. Ancestry do acknowledge that the quality of matches will have an impact but I have my reservations that the message will get across to the inexperienced & less knowledgeable.
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From what I remember reading the instructions from the first time I opened it, to be included matches are over 65cM who match at least 20cM with each other.
If that's the case the scope is so small as to be effectively useless. Someone with experience could cluster such matches in less than an hour.
What is more important are more remote clusters. A test will have clusters where the largest match is say 12-20cM, where the MRCA is probably around the 1700 AD window. Throw in an interface that pinpoints common localities, surnames and common ancestors among the matches and they have a useful tool to dramatically save time and help people. That would also generate them more revenue.
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From what I remember reading the instructions from the first time I opened it, to be included matches are over 65cM who match at least 20cM with each other.
If that's the case the scope is so small as to be effectively useless. Someone with experience could cluster such matches in less than an hour.
What is more important are more remote clusters. A test will have clusters where the largest match is say 12-20cM, where the MRCA is probably around the 1700 AD window. Throw in an interface that pinpoints common localities, surnames and common ancestors among the matches and they have a useful tool to dramatically save time and help people. That would also generate them more revenue.
Agreed
I have 37 matches above 65cM and I know how all of them fit into my tree. They need to reduce the 65cM to 20cM.
However, they did say that soon users will be able to specify clusters based on a range of cM.
I would like to point out that yesterday when I first noticed the clusters were there, I only had two clusters but now I have three.
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Where does this clusters appear, do you need Pro tools?
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Where does this clusters appear, do you need Pro tools?
Yes this is a Pro Tools feature
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Also that this has taken so long and they are suggesting some users may not have the feature until December continues their odd development decisions. Testing things in staggered rollouts does make sense. But not over such a long time. See how quickly X and Google test new things. It's very quick.
It was something like a year between the announcement and full roll out of extending groups to 64 that it was full rolled out.
When they released some new interfaces for showing cM shared between matches with ProTools, the interface was buggy for many months and still is a bit now. You couldn't open more than one match without causing all further opened matches to display errors. There were new layers of user interface where there used to be one simple and easy to use navigation bar. By filtering your matches you wouldn't have any way to unfilter without using the back button or deleting part from the address bar.
They did fix some of that, but some still remain. For example, do a search for matches with ancestors in a place, delete the place, then search for ancestors with a name. The place will remain part of the search. There's also an error when adding a new group via the new interface, the group menu then greys out. You must reload the page and then add someone to a group. Further, when you edit groups via the new interface and then go to edit another one, you won't be able to. It will just bring up the edit box for the group you previously edited. You have to reload the page to edit another group. I assume there are more errors like this.
So it makes no sense why they are spending so long testing things. The team in charge of this is obviously not very good. Would be good to see Ancestry looking for avenues to expand their DNA database, particularly in Europe and even the UK. If all they have is lazily slopping out half-baked pay-walled upgrade, their most loyal customers cash cows are going to reach the point where there's nothing more they can do with it.
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Thanks
I wonder whether this explains why I have had no new shared Ancestors matches for months
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Thanks
I wonder whether this explains why I have had no new shared Ancestors matches for months
If everyone took a dna test and every tester had a complete and accurate tree there would be no mysteries, every day hundreds of new matches would appear and all with the correct shared ancestor(s) appearing in Thrulines.
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Well that was a let down!
My test had one cluster with 5 people in it, all 4th cousins closely related to each other. My sisters test had one cluster with 3 people in it, 1st or 2nd cousins, all known always.
Ancestry's continuing one-size-fits-all approach scores another own goal. If as implied by the screens the cluster is calculated on selection then it would have been no harder to add adjustable parameters as it is to have fixed ones.
Everything they do these days seems to be moving away from allowing informed users to reach the correct conclusions and towards encouraging uninformed users to reach the wrong conclusion quickly.
As it stands this tool is totally useless to me, lets see how long it takes to roll out adjustable parameters.
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The blog post Millmoor kindly shared is filled with the usual marketing hype and keywords to catch the inexperienced, less knowledgeable and dare I say the lazy. It's all made out to be an essential 'powerful' and 'easy' method at the click of a mouse. The clincher for me is the new “bulk add” feature, I'd hate to waste time adding them one by one', where do I sign?.
Let's just debunk one of the claims right out the gate;
What Is a Cluster?
Each group, or “cluster,” represents people who likely share the same common ancestor with you. Instead of looking at hundreds of individual DNA matches, you now have organised groups of matches. This makes it easier for you to figure out which side of your family any individual match belongs to.
But unassigned matches won't be included in cluster reports and my match list already shows which parent if I bother to look.
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In Ancestry I have 28 DNA Cousins who share 65cM or more with me.
Of those 28 there are 3 that are not in my family tree as they are not showing up in searches, all have no family tree and 2 are female so I have no idea if the surnames are their married names or birth names, of the 2 neither seems resident in the UK and the shared matches do give the likely Grandparent line to which each belongs. The 1 male shares my Irish lineage but both he and his half Brother may have been the subject to the Irish Adoptions that used to take place when the child was born in a “home for unmarried mothers”.
They are already in my Colour Coded Groups.
So as it stands Ancestry Clusters are likely to be of little use.
In fact you do not need to wait for the roll out simply follow The Leeds Method for the similar clustering results, do remember that this method also has a cM range to which it is applicable.
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Ancestry's continuing one-size-fits-all approach scores another own goal. If as implied by the screens the cluster is calculated on selection then it would have been no harder to add adjustable parameters as it is to have fixed ones.
As mentioned in a previous post. The genealogy companies are an a bad financial state, since government-imposed COVID restrictions + the Russian invasion of Ukraine pushed people into having little to no disposable income. This has pressured discretionary spending. As a result, both FindMyPast + Ancestry turned on their marketing affiliates. They basically burned down any growth to instead basically nuke their programs and just take ~100% of all income.
Take a look at Ancestry's profit over recent years:
2012: -$1.9 million
2015: $2.8 million
2016: $12.4 million
2022: -$82.1 million
2023: -$125.6 million
They are scrambling to try and patch this by squeezing us, their most loyal customers, and not even providing anything much in return. And as mentioned, nuking their affiliates, which probably only netted $1m tops.
I'd take a wild guess that Protools is bringing in around $12m a year, and has virtually no overhead.
Genealogy needs the money printer an ~0% interest rates.
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I have 25 matches above 50 cm. All bar two I can place despite several stemming from illegitimacy. I have my suspicions about how one of the other 2 is related to me but unfortunately my relevant 2nd cousins have their DNA on other sites!
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;D ;D They've foolishly released it to me so I had to try it. I name this feature 'Domestos' as it clears 99.9% of matches.
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Ancestry Matches by Cluster arrived on my computer today.
I have over 19,000 Ancestry matches, all bar 4 are clearly identified as Paternal or Maternal. 26 of my Paternal matches range between 65 and 292cM (the highest) but only 3 of my Maternal matches are within the defined clustering range. The clustering tool only captures 22 Paternal matches and some of those omitted are higher than the lowest of the ones included.
Ancestry gives me no option to cluster the Maternal matches (and the "ALL' button doesn't work either) and maybe that's because there are only 3 of them, but while it is curious, it doesn't really bother me because it is my Paternal side that I am researching.
The Paternal clusters don't add anything to what I already knew, so I am probably long past that stage in my search. Interestingly at least one of the Paternal matches (130cM) omitted from the clusters is an important match because it doesn't seem to belong to the other 4 clusters which ultimately all link up, as you might expect. This omitted Paternal match does share cM with one of the other omitted matches but not with the other two omitted matches. Maybe Ancestry doesn't regard 2 as a cluster?
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Hi,
Like others, clustering has just landed, and like others I am truly underwhelmed. Two clusters of three which should actually be a cluster of six, all second cousins so all already known.
The upside seems to be that you can now apparently have more than 64 groups, cluster groups seem to be counted differently, so I now have 65 groups!
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Clustering has landed.
My Wife’s results, Sorry you don’t have enough matches yet.
Mine - a cluster of six, all of whom are known and in the Family Tree.
A managed test - 3 clusters, Mothers, Paternal Grandmother’s, four 1C or 2C’s who have tested.
My Nephew - via his Mothers side, his First Cousin Ian tested and is in one cluster yet Ian’s Brother Michael has a Daughter who has had her DNA tested and she is in a different cluster when she should share about 400cM with Ian.
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Hi Everyone,
I just looked at my Ancestry account and I have the clustering feature. I have 6 clusters. The top two are quite large and the last has 16 connections of which 4 are on the diagonal which is where one looks. The others are side matches.
But below the chart is a list which was quite unexpected and shows which side the diagonal matches come from Maternal and Paternal. And it's accurate for me. Very similar to what I have on My Heritage only that has more clusters as the cM cut off is lower.
There are also numerous dull green/grey squares which do properly cluster as the cM range is still limited but they are at least there.
Looks like it will be useful as time goes by for at least some people.
Essnell.
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Well you are lucky. Ancestry clusters won't work for me today - unexpected application error!
Anybody else got this?
Pheno
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I've had that every time and have to hit refresh.
Just tried the kit of a removed cousin that I can access, match list on that kit correctly shows the relationship between myself and my half sib but the cluster report predicts uncle and niece.
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Like others here, i have just got the cluster option, and have to say its very disappointing compared to the MyHeritage version. Despite most of my MH matches being transfers from Ancestry i only have 3 clusters compared to 21 from MH.
Now i do like the fact that the display is showing an overlap between 2 of the clusters (effectively making one a sib-cluster of the other). But otherwise the clusters are not showing me anything new, all the people are ones i have linked in my tree already, so not giving me any new hints to look at.
I know its only beta, so things might get better as they refine the logic, but i am not going to hold my breath.
Richard