ThruLines Improves My Common Ancestor DNA Matches

AncestryDNA's ThruLines feature, introduced earlier this year, has been a game changer for my research. It's not perfect (and I'll be writing about that separately), but it's allowed me to better see my common ancestor matches much better.

So I did some crunching this morning, and here are my top five most common ancestor matches, who all settled in Nova Scotia, on my paternal side:

1. My ancestors with the most matches are my 4x great grandparents Samuel A. Fisher (1758-1812) and and Mary Tupper (1766-1812). I have a whopping 41 confirmed matches with others who descend from Samuel and Mary.
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2. I have 23 confirmed matches with other descendants of my 5x great grandparents, Timothy O'Brien (1725-1777) and Margaret Gilmore (1727-1803). Timothy was born in Ireland, Margaret was born in Scotland. They settled in Nova Scotia.

3. I share DNA matches with 22 other descendants of my 4x great grandparents, Alexander Nelson (abt 1737-1803)and Margaret Robinson (1735-1823), both born in Scotland.

4.  I share my 5x great grandparents, Hugh Moor (abt 1705-between 1753 and 29 Mar 1758) and Jennet Morison (abt 1705 - after 1760) with 19 other of their descendants. Hugh died in New Hampshire, before several of his sons and his widow migrated to Nova Scotia.

5. Rounding out the top five most AncestryDNA matches on my father's side are my 5th great grandparents, Jonathan Godfrey (1739-1826) and Lucy Calkin (1740-1825), with 13 common ancestor matches. Jonathan and Lucy came separately from New England to Nova Scotia. It is through Jonathan that I trace my ancestry to Stephen Hopkins, the Mayflower passenger.

Moving to my maternal side, here are my top five most common ancestor matches (spoiler alert: they're all of Scottish origin):

1. I share my 4x great grandparents Hendry Weatherburn (1777-1858) and Agnes Melvin (1776-1832) with six other people.

2. This is a tie between my great grandparents, Frank Gillanders Matheson (1833-1909) and Annie Ross (1849-1922) and yet another set of 4x great grandparents, William Young (1760-1846) and Alison Spears (1764-1841). In both cases, I share matches with four other distant DNA cousins.

3. I have three confirmed matches with other descendants of James Knox (1756-1848) and Elizabeth Clark (1762-?)

4. A three-way tie for 4th spot with two confirmed matches with two sets of 2x great grandparents, Donald Matheson (abt 1794-1859) and Margaret McKenzie (abt 1798-1865), Alexander Ross (abt 1816-1853) and Isabella Smith (1817-1915) and with 3x great grandparents James Weatherburn (abt 1798-1849),son of Hendry and Agnes, and Margaret Edminson (1792-1879)

The fifth spot is hardly top five-worthy -- it is just one match with another person who descends from a set of 3x great grandparents.

You noticed the much lower matches on my mother's side, right? It could be the thousands of people who've done AncestryDNA tests just to find out their ethnicity, with absolutely zero interest in genealogy (I know! I can't believe it either!), or, and I think this is more likely, many people in the United Kingdom who still haven't tested because they're just not at all interested. No, don't get me started about how frustrating this is.

But more and more people are embarking on testing their DNA with companies like AncestryDNA. And so,

The never ending story continues....




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