Both Ancestry and MyHeritage have launched new tools this week!

Ancestry allows you to colour dot groups of people and have changed the interface to see more information - like your notes. They have also changed Circles for "ThruLines". These give your ancestors and DNA matches known to match to them if the trees match up. It's quite a good way of visualising all the matches on a particular branch! I think it's still processing through as I don't have any, but my uncle has heaps!

MyHeritage have launched their "Theory of Family Relativity". Russ Wilding mentioned it when he was here last year. It pulls info from all of MyHeritage's platforms and FamilySearch and makes a "theory" of how you might be related to a DNA match. It gives a probability as it might not be correct!
I've already found a huge mistake in my tree and finally figured out how a bunch of DNA matches fit in, so it's quite interesting.

So go and have a play! You never know what you might find!

rednicnz - 2019-02-28 18:37:00

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mixel - 2019-03-01 19:54:00

There's a couple of Thrulines that I'm very pleased with. And it's not like I've not searched trees and names and places.

However, I've already spotted that some of the proposed Thrulines are incorrect. A couple of matches have put siblings of one of my ancestors as their ancestors. This can't possibly be the case because I know exactly what happened to each and every one of them and none of them emigrated to North America. My ancestor is the only one who didn't die in Ireland! The records that they all have attached is a USA census with a birthyear and birthplace of Ireland.

I'll probably never be able to stomp out this inaccuracy.

4pc - 2019-03-01 20:58:00

Both of them are mixing trees and DNA. Given the quality of some of the trees out there and the vagaries of trying to get an algorithm to do the matches, it's quite surprising how many they get right! But there is definitely some rubbish in there!

Ancestry has a pop up box to give feedback. It pops up incessantly, so if you have a pet peeve, you can report it a lot!

rednicnz - 2019-03-02 13:02:00

Having looked at Thrulines for a couple of weeks now I have no idea why Ancestry has chosen to accept the the info in one tree over another tree for Thrulines.

Obvious errors in tree irk me, especially when these involve reasonably close relatives (my gt-grandparents or closer). A few times posters have said on here to "row your own canoe" and ignore incorrect trees.

Unfortunately those same incorrect trees can be the same trees that Ancestry is using to work out your DNA Thrulines.

One tree with only 60 people in it has one of my grandparents in it. I haven't a clue what her connection is, apart from the fact that she is researching an extremely common surname. TBH, I don't think she's connected at all. The misinformation is making a right mess of Thrulines. Although I the tree is private I can see from the Potential Ancestry hint exactly where her tree is mucking it up. I've messaged her with the correct info and hopefully she will change it.

It's easier for those with public trees. There's a repeated error at the gtgt-grandparent level where a son is recorded as the son of his father's brother. Until Thrulines I'd not realised how many (copied) trees had this error!

Still rowing my own canoe (I don't copy other trees), but getting rather tired of these errors.

4pc - 2019-03-15 23:59:00

I've sent feedback, that it would be good to have a reject button when it's wrong! Like on MyHeritage with their smart matches. The more times Ancestry get that feedback, the more likely it is to eventuate!

rednicnz - 2019-03-16 13:02:00

I found My Heritage (not the DNA one) had 2 obvious errors so dont know if they are too reliable.

frances1266 - 2019-03-16 19:57:00