Ancestry finally got me. I wasn’t going to pay for the Enhanced Tools, because I figured, why do I need them? I have 87,000 genealogy tools!
But then, I saw what the Enhanced DNA Tools could do – and I had to subscribe. Mind you, the new features are an additional $10/month to your existing subscription.
Let me show you how you can utilize the new Enhanced DNA Matches in a way that will help you. First, I went to a match who I could not place in my tree.
This person is unknown to me, and I don’t recognize their last name. Their tree also provided no clues. All I knew was that they were on my maternal side, based on who our shared matches were. But how did they fit into my tree?
With Ancestry’s new Enhanced Matches feature, I am closer to finding out!
When I click on my match and go to Shared Matches, I now see not only who they match with, but also how many centimorgans they match with our shared matches, and how those matches relate to my mystery match.
Since I know and can place the first six shared matches in my tree, I can now turn to DNA Painter’s What Are The Odds (WATO) Tool to help develop a theory! The WATO tool can be found here: https://dnapainter.com/tools/probability.
I built a tree into the WATO tool, based on the seven DNA matches that we share (including our own match). I theorize that my mystery match is on my mother’s generation, based on how they relate to our shared matches. I plug in their name and approximate year of birth, and add all the matches that I know in my tree that the mystery match shares:
Now I click on the Suggest Hypotheses button, and this is what gets returned:
It has provided me with 14 hypotheses. Let’s go through each one.
H1: The match would be a person on my children’s generation. Since I theorize that they are on the same generation as my parent, I can discard this hypothesis.
H2: The match would be a person on my generation. Since I theorize that they are on the same generation as my parent, I can discard this hypothesis.
H3: Same as H1. Discard.
H4: The match would be on my parent’s generation. Keep.
H5: Same as H2. Discard.
H6: Same as H1. Discard.
H7: The match would be on my Grandparent’s generation. None of my Grandparents are living. I think I can safely discard this one.
H8: Same as H4. Keep.
H9: Same as H2. Discard.
H10: The match would be on my Great-Grandparent’s generation. They would not be alive. Discard.
H11: Same as H7. Discard.
H12: Same as H4. Keep.
H13: Same as H10. Discard.
H14: Same as H7. Discard.
This leaves me with three hypotheses to examine more closely:
Now I can look at the probability scores. There are three different probability scores. We will test these hypotheses below:
1. Score 79 (Hypothesis 4): JBP is on my Parent’s generation. In this scenario, my Great-Grandmother had a half-sibling that this match descends from. This is true – her father married twice and had children by both spouses. The other spouse’s descendants could have come to the U.S. like my ancestor did.
2. Score 10 (Hypothesis 8): The same scenario as Score 79.
3. Score 1 (Hypothesis 12): My 2nd Great Grandparent would have a half sibling, from whom this match descends.
In fact, if you scroll down on the screen with the hypotheses, it states:
Since I have narrowed it down, I now theorize that this DNA match is likely a descendant of my 2nd Great Grandfather, Jozef Gut, and his wife, Madej Mikolajczyk. Now I need to find information to prove this! But I am closer now to solving the mystery of this DNA match than I was before Ancestry’s new enhanced DNA tool.
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