And the next Ancestry feature is.............

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

Remember how not so long ago 'circles' was the latest and greatest thing to encourage people to contact and collaborate with each other and solve mysteries? I think the most telling thing for me in the upload was Christa saying she doesn't attempt to message someone until she has worked out who they are.  To message or not to message? That is the question (but don't ask Ancestry as they don't seem to know themselves).

[SouthseaSteel]

Going back to autoclusters if I may, what does each cluster actually "represent"?  Is it a specific MRCA (single or couple), or is it something else?

Tx

[louisa maud]

Good question, I would like to know as well.

LM

[GailB]

In general, it is a group of people who match each other. It could be one MRCA but could span a couple of generations.

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

Going back to autoclusters if I may, what does each cluster actually "represent"?  Is it a specific MRCA (single or couple), or is it something else?

Tx

From the  'read me' file MH send with every report;

 "Each color represents one shared match cluster. Members of a cluster match you
and most or all of the other cluster members. Everyone in a cluster will likely be on
the same ancestral line, although the most recent common ancestor between any of
the matches and between you and any match may vary"



 

[SouthseaSteel]

Going back to autoclusters if I may, what does each cluster actually "represent"?  Is it a specific MRCA (single or couple), or is it something else?

Tx

From the  'read me' file MH send with every report;

 "Each color represents one shared match cluster. Members of a cluster match you
and most or all of the other cluster members. Everyone in a cluster will likely be on
the same ancestral line, although the most recent common ancestor between any of
the matches and between you and any match may vary"

Thanks. TBH I posed the question after reading exactly that as although I understand it and it cant be argued with, it is vague and doesnt actually say what a cluster "represents".  Mind you neither does a 90 minute video from Family History Fanatics!!

My hypothesis is that a cluster nominally represents a MRCA along with all the vicissitudes and exceptionalism of DNA analysis.  I hope somebody can confirm or dispute that.  Cheers

[4b2]

Crazy it's taken them so long to even think of this, never mind implement it.

I believe that there used to be a website that did this for you, that Ancestry requested to cease and desist. Yet they've taken years to actually roll this out.

I also have a script I built to download all matches and then build auto-clusters. It took about three days, with almost all of the work on figuring out on how to best cluster matches. Don't know why it takes them a year to just roll out 64 groups (which is still not enough).

There are so many tools Ancestry could make, but it seems they are very slow. Another I use is compare matches between two tests. This is useful as Ancestry only show some common matches - not sure exactly how that works as they obviously don't all share the same MRCAs. So with something like a 3rd cousin, you might share a few hundred matches, while Ancestry only shows maybe 20-30 common matches. When those 'hidden' shared matches form themselves into clusters, while others are just coincidental via non-shared ancestry. When you have mutual clusters, that Ancestry doesn't show as shared, the most likely explanation is shared ancestry, while not sharing the same 8cM+ cluster as yourself.

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

I might have an example of clusters/grouped matches showing some of the limitations

On Ancestry a group of over 50 shared matches all traced back to an ancestral couple, along with a dozen shared matches I can't trace back primarily due to consecutive generations of illegitimate births and possible migration so no bmd records in England/Wales .

An MH match from the UK has also been traced back to the same ancestral couple but the shared matches on MH are all from the USA, one of the 50 Ancestry users did upload to MH but is too distant to the UK MH user to be in an autocluster report.

I only know the UK MH user links to the Ancestry users because I have built a large floating branch on my tree with matches from the different platforms, for obvious reason the site reports can only use data from within their own database but somewhere there's a split in the family resulting in UK and USA descendants but looking at each site independently and without the floating branch available they look like totally separate/unconnected families. 

[rsel]

Has anybody seen any sign's yet that ancestry is actually delivering this autoclusters feature ?  It was mentioned as being a couple of weeks, and its not been 2 months and i have not seen anything appear on my account (and i do have a pro-tools subscription, so its not hidden in that :-) )

Richard