Good luck with your results!
With persistence you may just find the link, but it may take time -- time for you to learn how to make sense of it all, and time for that one person that is key to breaking down your brickwall to finally decide to test. You could be that one person for someone else also
While you are waiting, build your tree, and when you get your results, look at your closest matches first and your COMMON matches. Use the colour tagging to sort your matches into branches as much as possible. You can start broad (maternal/paternal) and refine later. It is helpful if you have known family members who have tested which will allow you to figure out which side of the family an unknown common match comes from.
Also pay attention to anyone with people in their trees from the right area and time frame, and colour tag those also.
Please do not be discouraged if you email someone on your match list and do not get a reply. Keep plugging away. This seems to be a chronic thing with Ancestry matches who have only tested for their ethnicity. But there is another reason this may happen: When you send a message through the Ancestry messaging system, it is usually forwarded to the match's email. I have heard that sometimes people reply directly to that email instead of through Ancestry, which goes nowhere. So make sure to include your email address in any messages you send out.
My dad and I took the test about a year ago. There were some interesting results and we connected up to a first cousin of his in England, but both of us really wanted to know more about his paternal great grandfather's family in Ireland. It's been a long road and decades of traditional research just to get there, because my grandfather came to Canada alone as a young boy and knew very little.
I had found a family living in Ireland around the right time and they seemed like they could be the right fit for several reasons. I could not find the baptism I needed to prove it, but I still researched the heck out of them as the coincidences were too much to ignore.
Dad and I had a couple known close cousins come up on Ancestry from that side of the family, so I was able to tag some of our shared matches. There were a couple enticing ones. A couple didn't have trees and didn't answer emails. One was a man with surname from my *potential* 3rd great grandmother in Ireland, but didn't reply to email. One had a very small tree indicating he came from Ireland, did reply to my email, but had no clue beyond his grandparents and none of them had familiar surnames.
Finally just a couple days ago, a new match popped up. He had an Irish name but no tree and he was a common match with all the people above. He was estimated 4-6 cousins.
I emailed him right away. He emailed back right away. He said my surname sounded familiar and thought it had come up in his research years ago, which was "locked away" as he'd "completed" his tree. I replied did he recognize my potential 3rd great grandmother's surname. Yes he did. Then a day or so later he emailed me a scan of a hand drawn tree and there was my family in Ireland, with photos. The same one I had thought was mine but could not prove on paper. Boom.
He seemed keen to talk about our research together but sadly stopped emailing when I told him our common ancestor was 4 generations from my father.
I think he was hoping for a closer link. Or maybe he's just on holidays, let's hope.
Are you on Facebook? There are several fantastic groups helpful to people new to ancestral DNA. I've also heard great things about the book "The Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy" and have considered getting it myself. The author runs one of the groups on facebook.
