How essential is an Ancestry subscription for getting the most in my DNA test?

[phil57]

For my Cousins I set them as home person and view them, take a screen shot in both Pedigree and Tree Branch view and eMail the screenshots of the trees to the Cousins.

In Family Historian, which Sloe Gin and I are using, any individual in the tree can be set as the root person for creating a chart, and the resulting chart can be printed or saved as a PDF file. The resolution of resulting PDF files is excellent for clarity, even with large tree branches, and it is a trivial matter to hide certain individuals if necessary, e.g. sensitive in nature or living, before creating the tree. Similarly, reports or booklets, again printed or saved as PDF, RTF, plain text files etc. are trivial to produce on the fly, including citation and bibliography lists in various formats with inline references included in the main content.

Branches can be split off or copied to a new file for export or manipulation using the split tree helper function. It really is quite powerful software, which is why I am surprised that Sloe Gin apparently prefers to keep his maternal and paternal lines as two separate trees. When I share trees with relatives or DNA matches who I am corresponding with, I prefer to email them a copy of the relevant part of my tree or other information produced from FH, rather than sharing my Ancestry tree.

As I previously mentioned in this thread, my Ancestry tree only contains very basic information sufficient for hints, thrulines and common ancestor matching; no sources etc. I regularly upload new copies as my tree expands, so sharing my Ancestry tree is my least preferred option, as it would provide very little in the way of useful information and trying to keep track of individuals I had shared a particular copy with and asking if they still wanted access and/or migrating them to the latest version periodically would be a nightmare.

[Biggles50]

QUOTE:
"The easiest way is link your matches is to use the Common Ancestor filter, this display will then only show DNA matches where a link between you has been proposed by the Ancestry software.  The presented route is often cobbled together from multiple Trees that there are on Ancestry and hence care and validation of each person is really a good idea rather than blindly accepting what is presented as fully accurate.  We have found many errors and missing generations on said presented routes."

This is pure gold! Thank you Biggles. 

You are welcome and thank you for the complimentary comment.

[Mowsehowse]

QUOTE:
"The easiest way is link your matches is to use the Common Ancestor filter, this display will then only show DNA matches where a link between you has been proposed by the Ancestry software.  The presented route is often cobbled together from multiple Trees that there are on Ancestry and hence care and validation of each person is really a good idea rather than blindly accepting what is presented as fully accurate.  We have found many errors and missing generations on said presented routes."

This is pure gold! Thank you Biggles. 

You are welcome and thank you for the complimentary comment.

I have been struggling with making best use of my temporary access to Ancestry, and your tip isolated 3 people in USA who are all descended from siblings of my direct ancestor.
So it was VERY helpful to me.

Also, I may have been exceeding dense, but in case anyone else is still searching for "THRULINES" it is in the drop down menu from DNA. (Along the top!)

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

Common ancestors works fine on my maternal side to an extent (all are through one particular line), but I get a lot of matches that make no sense at all. Somewhere someone told a few fibs and I can't work out who and when as my matches are too distant.

My paternal side is an even bigger nightmare, it looks as if the name I have for my grandfather is simply untrue though my 'grandparents' did live together and appear together in the 1921 census. Most of my unknown paternal matches are either Irish or have a lot of Irish connections but the matches rarely have trees and/or inactive.  The same applies to the results on myheritage, 3rd-5th cousins mostly with trees full of entries with just a surname and private forename for generation after generation, no dates or places given and no replies to messages.
I've just had the results on ftDNA and again a large percentage seem to have links to Ireland though there are lots in the USA and Canada though they are mostly marked as 'less active', knowing my luck that means they added their results and vanished afterwards. Thereis one match who has 24 shared matches so maybe I might get lucky but I have a feeling the link is a short lived meeting my grandmother had at some point and it will be almost impossible to pin down who, where and when.