Author Topic: Matching with a user on one site but not on another  (Read 800 times)

Offline emeraldcity

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Matching with a user on one site but not on another
« on: Thursday 20 May 21 13:22 BST (UK) »
I have a 40 cM match on LivingDNA who has also tested on Ancestry where we do not match at all. I know you can get false positives in very low cM levels, but is 40 cM not a bit high for such a thing to occur?

(I also manage my father's test and he fails to match the user in question on Ancestry too - we all match at around the 40 cM level on LivingDNA)

Could this be part of the way Ancestry filters out presumed pile up regions? The 40 cM match and I both have ancestral heritage in similar regions (North East England). Must admit I'd never heard of the term until doing a bit of research this morning so may be off base on that one... but all I can think of?

Offline Zaphod99

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Re: Matching with a user on one site but not on another
« Reply #1 on: Thursday 20 May 21 13:40 BST (UK) »
I'm not an expert but 40-cm Morgans seems very significant to me. Have you really checked that you are comparing the two things correctly? I'm surprised that an 8cmMorgan match on gedmatch isn't visible to me on my heritage. Which chromosome and position are you looking at?

Zaph

Offline emeraldcity

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Re: Matching with a user on one site but not on another
« Reply #2 on: Thursday 20 May 21 14:42 BST (UK) »
I'm not an expert but 40-cm Morgans seems very significant to me. Have you really checked that you are comparing the two things correctly? I'm surprised that an 8cmMorgan match on gedmatch isn't visible to me on my heritage. Which chromosome and position are you looking at?

Zaph

Not sure I have access to chromosome or position details on LivingDNA unless I'm missing something obvious.

But yeah, quite sure I'm comparing the right things. The 40 cM user in question messaged me on LivingDNA and then referred me to her Ancestry tree where she mentioned also having tested, yet no match visible on the profile page. Have manually checked on my DNA matches page too just in case it was a bug of some kind but still nothing.


Offline emeraldcity

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Re: Matching with a user on one site but not on another
« Reply #3 on: Thursday 20 May 21 21:17 BST (UK) »
Just to keep this thread updated in case anyone comes across a similar scenario: LivingDNA replied to my email query about this telling me they have a 10% false positive rate at 4th cousin level, so presumably that's what's happened here. I thought 40 cM would be beyond that point but evidently not!


Offline phil57

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Re: Matching with a user on one site but not on another
« Reply #4 on: Saturday 22 May 21 13:48 BST (UK) »
I have tested with Living DNA but am still trying to get onto Ancestry as my samples keep failing processing. I uploaded my Living DNA raw data to GEDmatch and had a match with another kit at 37.5 cM which I investigated and turned out to be a 4C1R. Her original upload to GEDmatch was from MyHeritage.

But, she has also tested with LivingDNA, and we match at 54.2cM on their site. I don't know, but I assume that Living DNA may be counting smaller segments in their total match length that other sites disregard due to the higher possibility of false positives.

Have you investigated your Living DNA match for any hints of common ancestry? If you can persuade them to upload to GEDmatch and you do the same, you can see a breakdown of the matching segments by chromosome and segment lengths using the comparison tools. If that shows a single fairly large shared segment amongst the total, it's probably worth pursuing, but it could also show that your match is comprised of several much smaller segments. GEDmatch ignore segments less than 7cM by default.

I'm no expert, but from what I've read any single segment of more than 15cM should be considered at least 99% probability of being inherited by descent. So it really depends how your match is made up by segment sizes.
Stokes - London and Essex
Hodges - Somerset
Murden - Notts
Humphries/Humphreys from Montgomeryshire

Offline JohnDoe2020

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Re: Matching with a user on one site but not on another
« Reply #5 on: Wednesday 09 June 21 21:28 BST (UK) »
Ancestry filters out small segments. It may be the 40cM is made of 8- 5cM segments which would not show in their record. All the testing companies use different criteria for counting cM's. 23 and Me count the X chromosome. FTDNA uses smaller pieces in their total, etc.

Probably not a solid match for you if they don't match on Ancestry. You never know without some research...