RootsChat.Com

DNA testing can take the fun out of research -- not everyone wants to 'press a button' and build a tree. Often traditional research comes up with information nuggets of gold that have been added to a parish register after the original entry. A good example of this was a great aunt, born out of wedlock, the baptism transcription gave the mother's name, occupation and abode but no father. Eventually found the baptism record and a note in the margin (written in a different hand) gave the father's name, occupation and abode.

I don't think of it as an either/or situation. It's another (very powerful) tool in the toolbox to be used in conjunction with all the other tools. It's my electric screwdriver not my magic wand, very useful when used correctly, but it's not going to do the work for you.

This is my Ancestry wishlist from a point of view of ease of implementation, obviously Chromosome Browser is no. 1 on everyone's list but would require a lot of screen development, this list is more the things they could give us fairly easily.

1. Segment data download - simple download of zip file containing the matching segments between dna matches.

2. Triangulation - show which Shared Matches actually triangulate.

2b. Include triangulation segment data in 1.

3. Admit that outside of the USA the place name database is a total mess and start fixing it.
Adding Parish Names, Township Names and Registration District Names would be a good place to start.

4. More fully integrate the DNA and Tree data sets so that for example the normal (and quite good) search function could be filtered by dna matches.
This would allow more complex searches than just surname and location to be carried out on the trees of dna matches.

5. Add the ability to save the searches for future use.

6. Add logic functions to the filtering of dna matches. Give us AND, OR, NOT and brackets so that we just see the matches we want to. Admittedly this would be more work than the others but would be really useful.

The real improvement I'd like to see is stop treating everybody the same, make all the limits they hard code in be changeable so that they can be adjusted to suit our particular needs. Oh and stop making it so easy to add the wrong data to peoples trees, not sure how to do this though.

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.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I've got access to Belford Erskine Street baptisms where there are 200 or so entries between 1793 and 1820, none of which are Johnson, or similar.

Sorry it's a negative answer.

These records are on the NDFHS website. I can fully recommend joining, it's £15 a year, and their online records are very useful if you have ancestors in Northumberland or Durham.

As you say the y-dna won't help.
There is no evidence that my GGM had any other children after my GM, she was 38 at that time. The earlier children were all from her first husband. A few years later she married her second husband and was living with him and his child (not hers) with the earlier children in orphanages or living with siblings. All of this was investigated at depth several times years ago and again in the light of dna. The first husband is not the father (or grandfather which was an examined if slight possibility), and neither is the second husband. None of the suspected dna matches (the Unknown group) have close enough matches to be able to assume any surnames. The Unknown group, where they have trees, have ancestors in the area outlined above in the late 19th century and beyond, so almost certainly a local rather than a seaman.
So what I am left with is a man between the ages of 20 and 60, with an unknown name, maybe one of the Potentials' names, but maybe not as they may be a couple of generations away, who was in or within traveling distance of Sunderland in mid 1892.
Ideally they had another child whose descendant gets a dna test, they would then be my H2C with about a 120 cM match. There is currently no-one anywhere near that, who is an Unknown, on Ancestry, MyHeritage, Gedmatch or FamilyTreeDNA.
That leaves me with a lot of Potentials who are probably at least one or two generations removed from my GGF so I need to reduce the number down to less than ten, say, and examine them closely.
I am currently looking at BanyanDNA as a way of testing the likelihood of connections but it will be a lot of work as it is really does the inverse of what I need. It tests given Hypotheses and what I need is it to tell me the most likely Hypothesis.
Hence the original question, I'm looking for another angle of attack.