Alders,
I am sorry that you have found the DNA experience a disappointment but I do urge you to stay in touch with your Ancestry DNA pages even if just occasionally. There are nuggets but as with most mining, a fair amount of digging is required to unearth them.
May I suggest that you start by concentrating on the first page only of your matches and start with those where a tree is attached (please be aware that some "testees" do have accessible trees but haven't linked their tree to their results). You can find these by first clicking on a match and them clicking on the person. If they have any public trees these will be listed.
Being ancient, I rely (a lot) on the notes function on the results page to remind me what I found when I last investigated the result. If I've contacted this person, I keep a note of it. Ancestry's handling of messages from within its DNA section seems rather random when it comes to filing outgoing messages.
The "shared matches" tab is the richest vein of data. I may not recognise anyone in
John Smith's tree but both he and I share a match with
Mary Jones. It is not too great a mathematical leap to assume that
John and
Mary are both related to me through the same branch.
If you read other postings in Rootschat's DNA forum, you will have realised that:
- Most people don't have linked trees;
- Most people don't respond to contacts "out of the blue";
- Most matches cannot be linked to a recent common progenitor;
- Ethnicity estimates are the proverbial ashtray on a motorcycle.
It is useful to remember that many tests were submitted by people with no active interest in genealogy but thought that a hundred quid or so would prove their family really were related to Oliver Cromwell.
At the risk of prodding another wasps' nest, it's all a bit like Ancestry's hints. Many of them are palpable nonsense but every now and then...
