Custom Clustering from Ancestry

[Biggles50]

Biggles,
You've been hugely helpful for me recently. So, sorry for another question...
What indicates that that snip in your last post is part of one big cluster?
I have a whole bunch of small (3x3 / 4x 4) clusters which I am treating a separate tiny entities. Which I am hoping will at some point in the future join up (although it is slow going at the moment, with so many matches having no tree at all / only a single person "private" tree / are in the US, Aus, Can, NZ so I can't check trees, I am having to resort to working from unchecked Anc trees to try to triangulate to a common ancestor).

Thanks for your kind comment.

I cannot display the whole cluster on my iPad just a portion of it so snip is a misnomer.

I have not yet got my head around all the multiple clusters that Ancestry produces.  Guess I will have to print them out as I do not have the screen real estate to display the cluster onscreen together and still being able to read the names.

[ReadyDale]

Ah Ok.
As you've been such a oracle and guiding light of knowledge for me on my steep learning curve so far, I thought there was a sign that I was missing that grouped these seemingly independent mini (c.3x3) clusters (for me in my Excel equivalent of this) in to bigger groups.

[Ayashi]

The Standard cluster has been absolutely useless to me- it keep flitting between four matches related to each other and two sets of four related to each other. I know I've got more matches than that!

I've just had a tinker with the custom groups and clearly I'm not understanding it either. I wanted to get an easy representation of different descendants of my illegitimate great great grandfather vs the shared matches I think are his father's side of the family. I chose "sidekick" matches (as Anc puts it) from that suspect family and instead of showing them, or the shared matches I know we have, it kept padding out the clusters with his wife's side of the family  Argh!

[jc26red]

I am getting frustrated with how many shared (maternal/paternal or unassigned) matches I am getting and Ancestry removing confirm your match beyond 4th cousin… I have so many I can confirm which are 4th x1r or 2r which I have to mark up as distant on Anc..
I have managed to verify my lines back to beyond 4th grandparents which is good but my distant and wider matches are a right mixed bunch! ok if they come from the same area, I accept there’s  a possibly of meeting and getting friendly but not when I get one verified paternal match who never left the UK and the rest are maternal coming from the US  🤣  Trying to tell myself they are false positives.

[Josephine]

The Standard cluster has been absolutely useless to me- it keep flitting between four matches related to each other and two sets of four related to each other. I know I've got more matches than that!

I've just had a tinker with the custom groups and clearly I'm not understanding it either. I wanted to get an easy representation of different descendants of my illegitimate great great grandfather vs the shared matches I think are his father's side of the family. I chose "sidekick" matches (as Anc puts it) from that suspect family and instead of showing them, or the shared matches I know we have, it kept padding out the clusters with his wife's side of the family  Argh!

Apologies if this is a stupid question, but I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.

If I understand you correctly, you have an illegitimate great-great-grandfather (let's call him Mr. X). He had a wife. You've identified DNA matches with their descendants and with the descendants of other members of their wider families.

You want the Custom Clusters to distinguish between the descendants of the father of Mr. X (the descendants of Mr. X's siblings) from Mr. X's descendants. But you're finding that the Custom Clusters can't do this.

Is that because the amount of shared cMs is too small for the system to easily distinguish between Mr. X's descendants and his sibling's descendants? Is it because the system's cut-off of 20 cM as the lowest shared amount is too high for your purposes?

What would the solution be? A different tool? A modification to the Custom Clusters tool? A different type of DNA test altogether?

I hope you don't mind my asking. I'm trying to learn what I can about the DNA aspect of genealogy research and sometimes it's a struggle to wrap my mind around these things. I find that I tend to use various programs in limited ways and don't always know about everything they can do for me.

[Biggles50]

I am getting frustrated with how many shared (maternal/paternal or unassigned) matches I am getting and Ancestry removing confirm your match beyond 4th cousin… I have so many I can confirm which are 4th x1r or 2r which I have to mark up as distant on Anc..
I have managed to verify my lines back to beyond 4th grandparents which is good but my distant and wider matches are a right mixed bunch! ok if they come from the same area, I accept there’s  a possibly of meeting and getting friendly but not when I get one verified paternal match who never left the UK and the rest are maternal coming from the US  🤣  Trying to tell myself they are false positives.

We all are all getting to grips with the new feature and learning its quirks so we can probably not provide anything definitive to help.

The present initial iteration of the Custom Clustering feature is limited in the range of cM that can be selected for the available Matches.

Maybe this will change in future revisions, who knows but time will tell.

In your case the relationship with the Matches is probably distant and maybe a half relation and the cM with them or with those Matches who may hold a key to unlocking who is who and hence will not necessarily show in the cluster directly.

If you can identify those Matches of interest with Shared matches who share over 20cM with you and include them in the Custom Cluster selection process, this may be a workaround for you.

For info for other Forum Members.

In Pro Tools we can look at all Shared Matches irrespective of the cM that you share with them.

Warts and all and a potential problem may be false positives, I do not know if this is actually likely ir otherwise but it is probably good to be cautious.

In getting the system to function we select a reference match and up to 4 shared matches, the caveat being that the shared cM has to be between 20 & 1300 cM.

Hope this helps.

[Ayashi]

Apologies if this is a stupid question, but I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. 

No apologies needed, no stupid question

If I understand you correctly, you have an illegitimate great-great-grandfather (let's call him Mr. X). He had a wife. You've identified DNA matches with their descendants and with the descendants of other members of their wider families.

Correct. I've got DNA descendants from three children of the marriage. Mrs X had a big family so there are a lot of DNA cousins on her side. That was at least helpful in separating out shared matches of the descendants that didn't come from Mrs X's side of the family, meaning they should be Mr X. I have Mr X's mother's side back several generations so when I got a lot of matches to one family that wasn't hers, it seemed good odds that it is the unknown father's family.

You want the Custom Clusters to distinguish between the descendants of the father of Mr. X (the descendants of Mr. X's siblings) from Mr. X's descendants. But you're finding that the Custom Clusters can't do this.

I hoped that I could narrow the cluster down to only Mr X's father's family, showing cM amounts and positive connections between different members of that family and one or more descendants of Mr X. Instead, it ignored the names I asked it to compare between (and I know there's a DNA match, not least because it only allows 'sidekick' matches that are connected) and gave me large clusters only of Mrs X's family.

Is that because the amount of shared cMs is too small for the system to easily distinguish between Mr. X's descendants and his sibling's descendants? Is it because the system's cut-off of 20 cM as the lowest shared amount is too high for your purposes?

I wondered that, but I don't think so. The cM amounts are similar to Mrs X's family so at least a few of them should have shown up. One of the descendants is very biased towards Mrs X's DNA so I could understand it in his case, but another has more DNA in common with Mr X's side. After some fiddling with it I did eventually get some of them to show up but perhaps more would with a lower cM threshold as you say. I imagine a lot of it is me not understanding how the function works. It might also be comparing between my mother's DNA results and the home person (another descendant) I selected so it's giving all results for people we are both related to, although that still doesn't explain the bias towards Mrs X's results. I might have another tinker with it.

I hope you don't mind my asking. I'm trying to learn what I can about the DNA aspect of genealogy research and sometimes it's a struggle to wrap my mind around these things. I find that I tend to use various programs in limited ways and don't always know about everything they can do for me.

Not at all, although I think this entire thread is other people also being confused! Asking questions is great

[Josephine]

Thank you so much, Ayashi.

It's funny, because later in the day I tried to do a Custom Cluster, only to discover that all of the people who should have been in it (maybe a handful or two) shared below 20 cMs with me. Whoops!

I wonder if one of the reasons for the cut-off is that the resulting clusters would be so huge they'd be unmanageable, both for the user and/or for the system that would be generating them? I already have some clusters with 72 people that I have to shrink in order to see them all at once, but then it's really hard to see all the tiny names, etc.

I've been using the Shared Matches tool and it's been really helpful. It would just be nice if a machine would do all that work for me (LOL).

[stonechat]

I am really unclear what issue this clustering will help with.

I tried a match of 55cmorgans, who shares my grandmothers maiden name

I doesn’t really help much

The standard match won’t work at all for me