Ancestry Clusters

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

I imagine at least one of the US based youtube channels will give it the usual glowing report when they have access and wait a few days for the fuss to die down before adding the heart/like  to comments highlighting the flaws and drawbacks.

Looking into my crystal ball I can see a lot of disappointed and confused people thinking it's an easy 'one click' way to automatically group matches while completely missing the fact that the upper limit of 1300cM will exclude full & half sibs, grandparents, aunts/uncles, nieces/nephews and possibly some very high 1c matches from the reports. Ancestry do acknowledge that the quality of matches will have an impact but I have my reservations that the message will get across to the inexperienced & less knowledgeable.
 

[4b2]

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.

If that's the case the scope is so small as to be effectively useless. Someone with experience could cluster such matches in less than an hour.

What is more important are more remote clusters. A test will have clusters where the largest match is say 12-20cM, where the MRCA is probably around the 1700 AD window. Throw in an interface that pinpoints common localities, surnames and common ancestors among the matches and they have a useful tool to dramatically save time and help people. That would also generate them more revenue.

[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.

If that's the case the scope is so small as to be effectively useless. Someone with experience could cluster such matches in less than an hour.

What is more important are more remote clusters. A test will have clusters where the largest match is say 12-20cM, where the MRCA is probably around the 1700 AD window. Throw in an interface that pinpoints common localities, surnames and common ancestors among the matches and they have a useful tool to dramatically save time and help people. That would also generate them more revenue.

Agreed

I have 37 matches above 65cM and I know how all of them fit into my tree. They need to reduce the 65cM to 20cM.

However, they did say that soon users will be able to specify clusters based on a range of cM.

I would like to point out that yesterday when I first noticed the clusters were there, I only had two clusters but now I have three.

[ggrocott]

Where does this clusters appear, do you need Pro tools?

[GailB]

Where does this clusters appear, do you need Pro tools?

Yes this is a Pro Tools feature

[4b2]

Also that this has taken so long and they are suggesting some users may not have the feature until December continues their odd development decisions. Testing things in staggered rollouts does make sense. But not over such a long time. See how quickly X and Google test new things. It's very quick.

It was something like a year between the announcement and full roll out of extending groups to 64 that it was full rolled out.

When they released some new interfaces for showing cM shared between matches with ProTools, the interface was buggy for many months and still is a bit now. You couldn't open more than one match without causing all further opened matches to display errors. There were new layers of user interface where there used to be one simple and easy to use navigation bar. By filtering your matches you wouldn't have any way to unfilter without using the back button or deleting part from the address bar.

They did fix some of that, but some still remain. For example, do a search for matches with ancestors in a place, delete the place, then search for ancestors with a name. The place will remain part of the search. There's also an error when adding a new group via the new interface, the group menu then greys out. You must reload the page and then add someone to a group. Further, when you edit groups via the new interface and then go to edit another one, you won't be able to. It will just bring up the edit box for the group you previously edited. You have to reload the page to edit another group. I assume there are more errors like this.

So it makes no sense why they are spending so long testing things. The team in charge of this is obviously not very good. Would be good to see Ancestry looking for avenues to expand their DNA database, particularly in Europe and even the UK. If all they have is lazily slopping out half-baked pay-walled upgrade, their most loyal customers cash cows are going to reach the point where there's nothing more they can do with it.

[ggrocott]

Thanks
 

I wonder whether this explains why I have had no new shared Ancestors matches for months

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

Thanks
 

I wonder whether this explains why I have had no new shared Ancestors matches for months

If everyone took a dna test and every tester had a complete and accurate tree there would be no mysteries, every day hundreds of new matches would appear and all with the correct shared ancestor(s) appearing in Thrulines. 

[Steve3180]

Well that was a let down!

My test had one cluster with 5 people in it, all 4th cousins closely related to each other. My sisters test had one cluster with 3 people in it, 1st or 2nd cousins, all known always.

Ancestry's continuing one-size-fits-all approach scores another own goal. If as implied by the screens the cluster is calculated on selection then it would have been no harder to add adjustable parameters as it is to have fixed ones.

Everything they do these days seems to be moving away from allowing informed users to reach the correct conclusions and towards encouraging uninformed users to reach the wrong conclusion quickly.

As it stands this tool is totally useless to me, lets see how long it takes to roll out adjustable parameters.