Ancestry Clusters

[GailB]

Just noticed that I now have Ancestry clusters. Very disappointing at the moment because I only have two clusters, one paternal and one maternal. They are still working on it though so I hope to see a vast improvement.

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

I expect a lot of head scratching and questions from people when it rolls out, if it's anything like MH then a lot of matches will be excluded as they won't meet the criteria needed but we will have to wait and see how well Ancestry explain it (if they explain it at all).

[GailB]

From what I remember reading the instructions from the first time I opened it, to be included matches are over 65cM who match at least 20cM with each other.

What I have noticed from checking the 16 accounts I have DNA access to is that immediate family are omitted - parent/child, full and half siblings etc. Aunt/uncle and nephew/niece, first cousins are included.

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

I wasn't expecting it to be a game changer given my matches and with just 27 matches above 65cM it's unlikely to make much difference to me. My tree will always be a headache no matter what tools and features come out so I try to be realistic and not be reliant on them for breakthroughs.

MH only include matches between 30-400cM who share a minimum of 35cM with each other

[GailB]

Some users may not get this feature until December 2025

https://support.ancestry.com.au/s/article/Science-of-Matches-by-Cluster

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

Almost makes me wonder if the longest nights being in the southern hemisphere right now, the release of a new protools feature and protools costing money are connected in some way. 
 

[Millmoor]

I have just checked and I also have the new clusters feature. This is my result.

" We're sorry, we couldn't cluster your matches - This may because you don't have enough matches yet. You can try again as more people take DNA tests.".

I have over 28,000 matches! The reason for this is more likely to be , as Glen has suggested , the nature of my matches not meeting their criteria. My highest match is 128cM.

(I did transfer my ancestry kit to MH where I have 9 clusters. To be honest I have not found them that helpful!).

William

[Biggles50]

We do not have it as yet.

The image is of the clusters from the My Heritage account that we used to have.

It was totally useless, the large cluster has zero useful matches that could only be resolved by considerable more time and effort than I am prepared to undertake.

The 3 DNA “Cousins” that I found were on MH are in the Light Blue cluster at the bottom right, all the others in this cluster are unresolved due to lack of useful information that was available about each of them, not that there were many.  There are only two other DNA matches in this Group which sort of makes it pretty useless as in Ancestry this is my Irish Group which is 100 strong who share 20cM and greater with me and there are hundreds of them in total who I have yet to include in the Coloured Groupings.

If as I suspect Ancestry continues to allow Nicknames as displayed user names together with no basic information about the person then Clusters will not likely to be of great value.

[Millmoor]

Here is a link to the Ancestry blog about this new feature:

https://www.ancestry.co.uk/c/ancestry-blog/dna/dna-matches-by-cluster?srsltid=AfmBOooaMyjqiDtcgFCaVBSRtlqZaS3j4Z5umf1pE8XuPFY7LDFrhvdm

One quote from it caught my eye " If you do not have many matches sharing 65cM of DNA with you, then it will not work, and it will not place any matches labelled "Unassigned" into a cluster."

Well that explains why I have no clusters and am not likely to have any in the future - I only have 6 matches of 65 cM and above and 4 of those are unassigned! ( As it happens the 4 are all close matches with each other and I know what the connection is. Quite why they are unassigned is yet another issue!).

I hope others fare rather better!

William