A Quick(ish??) Post about the Ancestry DNA Match change

A lot of people have written very well about this. It impacts every researcher who uses DNA matching and everyone has a different opinion. Which interests me as much as the event itself.

I’m no kind of expert. This post is about what the change means to me and the way I do my research.

So for context – if you do a DNA test with Ancestry, and you have a family tree on their site, and you link your DNA test to yourself in your tree, then Ancestry will compare your tree with the trees of your matches to see if it finds any common ancestors. It will then highlight these common ancestors so that you can compare the trees and see if you agree. If it’s correct then yes, you’ve found a cousin.

It looks like this:

The above match is female, has a linked tree with 79 people in it, shares 7cM with me which is a reasonably small match, and apparently has a common ancestor. I can then click on the tree link and check it out.

The suggestions go all the way down to myself and my match. I’ve cut off the lower ones for the sake of privacy.

I have several matches to these ancestors, one of whom is through an ancestral daughter who I’d never managed to trace. The common ancestors are definitely the same people. The paper trail verifies their movements. These are genuine matches. Two share 7 centiMorgans with me, one shares 6 centiMorgans.

Is it actually a DNA Match? I don’t know, because Ancestry doesn’t give us access to a chromosome browser. To me, it doesn’t necessarily matter. Well – it does and it doesn’t.

And this, I think, is where all the confusion and different opinions and complexity comes in.

On Family Tree DNA you do get a chromosome browser.

I picked two matches who also match each other and here’s the place that we all match. Same place on the same chromosome, that’s what makes it a real match. Of course, chromosomes are paired – there are two ‘number nine’ chromosomes, one that we got from our father, one from our mother. It takes a bit of comparing with known matches to determine which of that pair these matches are actually matching with. If they match in the same place on different chromosomes they are not a match, but if it’s the exact same one they are. Working it out can be done, and many of us enjoy that game.

If you can figure out which ancestral line a specific segment was inherited from, that’s useful. For the above ancestor John Peard and his wife Bridget Woodley, I could look for that precise segment match among the unidentified hordes who also match me, but haven’t got a tree – and I could say positively ‘This person also descends from John Peard and Bridget Woodley’. Or maybe I could say, ‘this person descends from a sibling of John Peard and Bridget Woodley’.

My example match is so far back, it takes a solid paper trail and a lot of time and a lot of matches with trees to even begin. I’ve been lucky with this one.

This is Ancestry’s ‘thrulines’ facility. It has pulled together every DNA match with those same ancestors – or with enough ancestors that some tree in the system can bridge the gap – and it shows them to me. I have twelve matches on Ancestry who also descend from John Peard and Bridget Woodley. It’s quite amazing, because I rarely stumble across Peard researchers. I’d never have found these guys were it not for DNA matching. I have another four on FtDNA who haven’t tested with Ancestry at all, including one who descends from John Peard’s brother. That’s sixteen matches back to my 3rd/4th/5th great grandfather in this family line.

The one on the far right is a genuine match but their tree is slightly wrong, so they don’t show up in the correct place.

Onto the harder ones:

The magic number in Genealogical DNA is 7 centiMorgans. Some scientists determined several years ago that a match of this length (or longer) is more likely to be genuine. If you go smaller, some will be genuine, some might not. And then you get what is called a ‘false match’.

I hate that term. It’s misleading. But that’s what everyone calls it.

A false match isn’t actually a false match. It’s not like a ‘false positive’ in a medical test. It’s not saying there’s a match when there isn’t. There really is a match.

Someone else’s chromosomes could have accidentally come together in the same sequence as yours – that can happen, and since they don’t share your ancestors at all it’s useless to spend time looking for a connection. This is the most genuine form of ‘false match’. It’s like the two boys in ‘The Prince and the Pauper – they looked identical, but they were not actually related at all. In a perfect world, there’d be some way of spotting these and filtering them out so what we could see were just the real ones.

But there are other sorts of ‘false matches’. You might match in much smaller segments from different ancestors that have ended up next to each other so it looks like a bigger match than it really is. A 4 centiMorgan segment from your father’s side next to a 5 centiMorgan segment from your mother’s looks at face value like a 9 centiMorgan match, until you check the matches in common. With the massive endogamy coming out of little villages across the world where cousins married second cousins and their children did the same, century after century, you end up with a lot of third/fourth cousins emigrating to the Americas or Australia or Canada who actually share enough DNA to look like first cousins. So we can look closely related when we aren’t.

That is, if I have an ancestor from West Limerick and you do too, we’re likely to have a very small DNA match whoever our ancestors were. And if I have an ancestor from Isle of Harris in Scotland and so do you, we’ll share DNA from there too. Just think how many people must have one ancestor from West Limerick and another from Isle of Harris. If those two segments are next to each other it looks like a different match to the one it really is.

It is still a genuine match though, really. Just way too hard to identify, and there’s always the chance that one portion is an accidental resemblance even if part is by descent. That one takes some untangling.

The next ‘false match’ is where the match has come down unchanged for so many centuries that the common ancestor is way before written records. This happens more often than anyone first imagined, and those segments are known as ‘sticky segments’. Since they have come down unchanged to so many people, you end up matching thousands of people who seem like fifth cousins but are really twenty fifth cousins. You’ll hear this multi-match chromosome region referred to as a ‘pile-up’ region.

Once again it’s a genuine match. But at this point we can’t use them. Nobody has the trees. I think in time we’ll get there, with enough people testing, enough records coming on line, enough chromosome painting. But not yet, and the process is fraught with error. So for now it’s a ‘false match’.

That’s the background.

DNA testing at Ancestry has really taken off. The site is groaning under the strain of all those testers, stuck at home now due to lockdowns, isolated and diligently exploring their match. Site response times are very slow. We often get error messages saying their backend servers are overloaded. It can’t go on this way.

So they’ve decided to remove all those 6 and 7 centiMorgan matches, because most are ‘false’. And the remaining 8+ matches will be far clearer.

So, what do I think about that?

A lot of people are utterly appalled. Even more people, I think, are happy about it. My knee jerk reaction was horror, because I hate to let anything go before I’ve had a chance to look at it for myself.

Now, I’m lucky. I come from Tasmania, a small island settled by convicts and soldiers. Every step my immediate ancestors took was recorded. Not only that but the records were deemed to be part of our heritage and were digitized and made available to us all for free. Civil registrations, convict files and newspapers. And being an island, all entry and exit was recorded too, in shipping records. We have excellent paper trails back to England, to those 7th/8th/9th great grandparents. So we – like most others – can really make use of small matches. But most people can’t. So to most people, those tiny impossible hints really are ‘false matches’.

I would prefer that it didn’t happen so soon, but they just might be right. In some respects.

I have a total of 38,047 matches on Ancestry. 410 are close matches (fourth cousin or closer). I know just how I connect to every close match that has a tree with the exception of four, and for those I at least know the region/ancestral branch. I can take a guess at many close matches without trees, but a few of them are a complete mystery.

What would I have lost had I never looked at my 6-7cM matches?

Actually, a lot!

I have identified twenty cousins through 6-7cM matches. Some were the Peard matches mentioned above. Another is the sister of my Irish Catholic ancestor Mary Woulfe of West Limerick, born in Sugar Hill at the cusp of parish records. Others are descendants of the Brown family, subjects of my last blog post.

Yes, some of my most exciting discoveries have been made through matches at this level. No, I’m not sure if they are DNA matches, but DNA matching has brought me paper-verifiable matches that I’d never have found because they moved to districts I could not have predicted.

So if you want DNA purity, then yes, this is probably the best idea. And Ancestry’s common ancestor feature only works back to about eight(?) generations, if you match at the ninth you have to put in the legwork yourself and look at trees, search for names. It’s a good idea for Ancestry, they can reduce their server overloads and keep us genies focused on more accurate data, not screwing up our trees making fake cousins fit when they don’t. I get it.

All the same, I wish I could have looked through my 30,000 or so 6-7cM matches before it happened. But if I’ve missed some amazing breakthrough, I’ll never know. So I’ll let it go.

It’s a pity, but it’s not the end.

An image showing ‘The Last Mile of England’ (Shropshire). It seemed appropriate.

A Family in Cambridgeshire in the late 1700s

This is the story of a family named Brown.

There’s a struggle most family historians will know. You spend years poring over records, identifying the ancestor, working on that jump back to the previous generation. Hoping that the unknown parents will turn out to be Winterfink or Albercoyle, something searchable that will stand out in lists and newspaper articles and interment records. Names like Brown or Smith can doom an ancestor to permanent obscurity.

My ancestors were John and Mary Brown, married 1760 in Fordham, Cambridgeshire.

As it happens they were more visible than expected, partly due to their grandson Robert born 1818. He was transported to Australia as a convict so we know a lot about him. Not only that, he lived a very long life among family equally blessed with longevity so the oral history is good. Robert Brown died in 1911, his son died in the 1950s.

Tracing the family back from Robert to his father Benjamin was simple. Benjamin (born 1785) married Susan (Susannah) Sargent, the names are unique enough, we have them in every British census and could build their family with ease. They spent their entire lives in the same region, which helped a lot. They were labourers, farmers, ploughmen. Agricultural pursuits right through. Our Robert seems to have been the only black sheep, the others appear fleetingly through births, marriages, death and census. A quiet and excessively numerous family.

The complication was Suffolk. Fordham is right there by the border and while Cambridgeshire records are available online, Suffolk is a great challenge for anyone not on the ground. Benjamin came from Fordham, his wife Susan from Exning. Susan was a brick wall for many years because of this.

Focusing on Fordham, Benjamin was the son of John and Mary Brown nee Boon.

Here is the whole family:

This may be incomplete. Eleven children seems like quite enough but there is a suspicious gap between Sarah No. 2 and John. There’s room for two more children there.

It’s complicated from here on in. For clarity, John Brown’s parents are referred to as ‘Granddad John’ and ‘Grandma Sarah’. John and Mary’s same name children are John Jr and Mary Jr.

We can only guess at the size of their house. Granddad John lived for some years in Landwade but was buried 1772 in Fordham, so he might have lived with them too.

A few generations earlier the Browns owned land and had wills, so our John Brown might have lived on his own land too. But his children clearly lived in rental places and there’s no indication land was passed on to any of them.

It was probably lucky that the eldest children in the family were girls. By the time their mother reached her less energetic middle years when pregnancy is harder and childbirth even more risky, she had a group of capable youngsters able to take the load on their own shoulders.

The first Sarah died at the age of six and was buried on 1st December 1767 in Fordham. She was the only child they lost.

John Junior was baptised on 27 November 1774, not long after the death of Granddad John. There was probably some rejoicing or at least relief that the head of this household would finally have someone to help with heavy work and take over the household if need be. Maybe they held their breath until he survived that dangerous first year. But the baby was hale and hearty, it seems, and grew up just fine.

Baby John had a bevy of personal carers in Mary (12), Elizabeth (10), Ann (8) and Sarah (6). That’s if Mary was still around; girls in this region were commonly out at work by the age of 11.

John was the only son for some time. His birth was followed by Hannah and Martha, and by now the eldest daughters were young adults, probably doing farm work or in service around the district.

Child number nine was Jane, baptised on 30th June 1782. She was six months old when her eldest sister was married.

The marriage was straightforward like everything else in the life of this family. Mary Jr was about to turn twenty. No doubt a capable home manager, experienced in childcare, she knew how to cook and sew and milk cows and nurse children through fevers and all those things required of a farmer’s wife in 1782. So when local man John Munns looked for a wife she was going to be a strong contender.

The Munns family, like the Browns and the Sargents, jumped across the county border between Fordham, Landwade and Exning. I’m not sure which side of the border they began on. I actually think we’ll find an earlier Munns link, maybe they were connected to Mary Boon. There’s a good chance young Mary Brown and John Munns knew each other their entire lives.

I imagine they announced their engagement and made plans. The marriage took place on the 18th November 1782. Everything respectable and straightforward.

I learned about Mary’s marriage through DNA matches with three of her descendants.

Two years later, Ann Brown formalised her union with farmer John Burling of Swaffham Prior, a village six miles from Fordham, three miles from Exning. It wasn’t a big move, but a good one socially and economically. John was a landowner in a modest way and his farm was quite successful.

I discovered Ann through another DNA match.

From this point on, the generations are slightly muddled. John and Mary Brown’s tenth child – their second son Benjamin – was baptised in the same week as Mary Jr’s apparent first child Henry Munns, and also John and Ann Burling’s first child Susannah.

At a calculated guess based on ages and proximity through the decades, I would say Benjamin Brown grew up playing with his nephew Henry Munns and his cousin William Brown. And the Sergeants/Sargents were there too, not yet married into the family but at all the social events. As were the Burlings.

This is the time to introduce William and Mary Sergeant of Exning.

William Sergeant and Mary Levett were married in 1778 and their eldest son John was born the same year. George, Susannah, William and Mary were born over the next few years, followed finally by Elizabeth, James and Eleanor. They lived in Exning and mostly stayed there, but they attended Brown weddings and the families knew each other well.

This, as far as I can see, is what English village life really was. Not individual families as we do it today, the whole population personally connected again and again. I’ve kept it simple so far.

In 1787, Susan Brown’s birth completed the family of John and Mary Brown. In this same year, little Susannah Burling was buried and a new Burling daughter was given the same name.

By 1788, Elizabeth Brown must have felt like an old maid. There she was aged 24, nieces and nephew popping up everywhere (Mary Munns and Isaac Burling came into the world this year). But finally it was time for her own wedding. She married John Frost in Isleham, Cambridgeshire.

I have DNA matches with Elizabeth’s descendants too.

Sarah may have married in Isleham too, there is a plausible marriage with John Peachey on 24th October, 1787. But I cannot be sure of it.

So having introduced all the characters now, we can pull the whole thing together. Mary Munns, Elizabeth Frost, Ann Burling and Sarah Peachey(?) are settled. There’s a gap now, which matches that six year child gap between Sarah and John. The four married daughters increased their families significantly. The Sergeant children are likewise growing up

On 27th September 1798, John Brown Junior was married to Ann Shinn in Fordham. He may have felt some pressure to do so, his father was sixty years old and probably starting to ail.

It was another time of rapid change. Hannah married Thomas Bishop in 1799 (DNA matches brought this to light), then came the death of John Brown, father and grandfather to this giant family. He was buried in the Fordham cemetery on 10th April 1801.

A year later was the first union with the Sergeant family through the marriage of Martha Brown and John, the eldest Sergeant boy. They spent a couple of years in Suffolk before moving to Fordham.

I discovered Martha through DNA matches too.

To conclude this part of their history, Benjamin Brown married Susan(nah) Sergeant in 1810, while Jane married William Durrant four years later. I have not located a marriage for Susan.

There’s just one more marriage to add.

The fifth Sergeant child was Mary, born a year later than my Benjamin, baptised 09th October 1786 in Exning.

Mary Sargent married Henry Munns, the eldest son of John Munns and Mary Brown.

It is confusing. John Sergeant married Martha Brown. Susan Sergeant married Benjamin Brown. Mary Sergeant married Henry Munns. You can see how I might have strong matches with other descendants of this family. But I also have matches with descendants of Eleanor Sergeant who married an Andrews, and with Burlings and Frosts and Bishops so it’s not just endogamy from that particular grouping.

In conclusion, this is the family of John and Mary Brown as I now know it, a long way ahead from my first post about the family. I wrote this first to help others researching this family, and second to show what DNA matching can achieve.

Now I’ll get on with more research.

Image captions:

1 Image by Bob Jones : Track near Fordham, from Wikimedia CC BY-SA 2.0 .No changes made.

2 Robert Brown born 1818 with grandchildren Lucy, Amy and Mary in Australia.

3 George Stubbs: Haymakers 1785 (public domain)

4 John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park, Essex showing rural features. There are very few paintings featuring Cambridgeshire.

5 Old man Family Hour Magazine 1854

6. I chose this image for the mud. Very much a part of British farming.