Each is in a different branch of my family, one on fathers side, one on mothers side. I just discovered from a friend that in order to qualify for a "circle" that there must be 3 members who all have trees...and one of these matches is handled by a person who is another match so it seems that would not qualify. Regardless I still think this is a pretty useless gimic, and ancestry would be better serving us with triangulation and chromosome comparison tools. GEDMATCH has a LOT of various tools (and if free to upload your info) that make it a lot easier to try to figure out where you match with other people, but as always, the best way to analyze these things is to have DNA tests from each branch of your tree so you can figure out along what branch you have a match with someone you don't know. That is pretty difficult to do. One person I emailed (a DNA match on GEDMATCH we are trying to figure out) about the uselessness of this new tool commented to me "The circles are cool, but I have some very confirmed results that do not appear. Like these are people that posted pictures of my grandparents and great grandparents, obituaries, etc. that I did not have myself. The circles lead you to believe a DNA test isn't necessary, but that's the only thing in my view that would be stopping them.


I also think it's comical that a circle for my great great grandfather includes myself, my son, another great great grandchild and my great great grandfather's daughter show as an emerging confidence level with the bar half full.


A tool I'd like to see would be people who share the same segments. I can do this on Gedmatch.com, where I exported my DNA results from Ancestry, but most people don't load their trees there. If you were able to do this on Ancestry, you could click another user and see others that share the same segment and narrow the relationship. Maybe it's not a good business model, who knows?"

Ancestry has long been disparaged regarding their testing by people who know a lot more DNA than I do...and now that they have changed the parameters (I suspect they have raised the threshold for cM's in common) we now have a manageable # of matches to look at, even though I still have 20 pages.

For years I discounted someone who sure "looked" like a cousin but due to having thousands of matches I never found her match in the data overload from ancestry...and now since they corrected this issue, which has brought criticism for a very long time, suddenly I find this person is indeed a cousin (5th-8th).

I don't depend on Ancestry.com DNA for anything. Half the time people don't have trees or have small trees which doesn't help you find the relationship anyway. I use FTDNA and GEDMATCH when I want to try to figure out folks. Ancestry DNA is just not good enough to make a clear determination on anything, unless you have already found that person by tree JMHO

Joyce