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I wish you success, Biggles50.

Those are all excellent points, 4b2.

Yes, I do follow the tactics you mentioned.

I have some match groups that probably have an MRCA from the early 1800s and others that are probably from the mid- to late-1700s and no one seems to have managed to build full enough trees to reveal the identities of those MRCAs. In most, or all, of those cases, the records needed to build such trees either aren't online or they don't exist at all anymore (if they existed in the first place).

I'll look at a DNA match and sort our shared matches by his/her highest to lowest matches. If my person of interest has a tree, I'll look at it. If his/her shared matches have trees, I'll look at those. (I'll also look at their highest shared matches and their trees.) I'll create custom clusters in case they might reveal anything. Etcetera, etcetera, until I either find something useful or give up. In the process, however, I've assigned them to a group with an appropriate label and added notations for future reference, just in case.

Once in a while, it pays off, but it's often a huge time-waster that makes me question why I'm doing this in the first place. 

Wow, JackB, that is really sad.

It's incredible how much our lives have been improved by science / modern medicine.

When I was young, my mother told me that in the olden days people could die from a sinus infection, and I've seen that listed as the cause of death on at least two occasions.

A lot of people in my husband's family, including his grandfather, died young of TB.

My great-grandmother had nine children between 1901-1915: six died in infancy.

I often wonder about people such as your relative who died of "Exhaustion with Diarrhoea" and the one who died of "Extreme Marasmus" -- did they have illnesses that might be more easily diagnosed and treated today?

For example, I was very ill for many years before a specialist finally diagnosed me with celiac disease (through biopsy and blood work). If I had been born in an earlier time, and had wasted away and died after years of life-limiting fatigue and weakness, what disease would have been blamed? 

Those are all good methods, Glen & Biggles50. I'm going to think about possibly incorporating some of them.

I like the idea of using more tags with my tree and coordinating those with my DNA matches. I use Reunion for the Mac and I've only recently starting using the tags, "DNA Match" and "DNA Match with Descendant." They're really helpful.

I hadn't thought of using numbers as group labels! Numbers might be better than letters, because I have duplicate first letters that are only differentiated by colours, which I can never remember. Then again, I'd have to keep a list somewhere to remind me of what the numbers stand for. It sounds like I have my matches split up into a more groups but it's out of necessity because I have so many mysteries.

It would be helpful if we could see more than the first number or letter of a group label while scrolling through the list of DNA matches.