I lost a match where we shared 28.8 continuous cms per Gedmatch. Ancestry v1 identified us as 4th cousins with 96% confidence. We were able to triangulate (in Gedmatch) with several people and traced back to a colonial family (all those who triangulated). My 4th cousin match and I had a common ancestor several generations down from the original colonial so that is why we were closer. The others traced back to either the colonial or one of his kids. Ancestry took all of these matches off my list. I am also sure of this match being related through this colonial family because I have several family members tested and can easily id which grandparent a match is coming from; we were also able to link a strong paper trail of death records, census records, published records, etc...

Anyway, I summize that I lost all of these related matches because this colonial family was HUGE. The original colonial had like 10+ kids and almost all of them had 10+ kids and all their kids had 10+ kids for 2-3 more generations. The Gedmatch triangulation identified 6 unrelated people on that same segment of DNA; so that gives you an idea of how disperse this family's DNA is.

Either way, this change will make it very hard - if not impossible - to use Ancestry DNA results to trace your line back to colonials --- esp those who had huge families.

The usefulness of Ancestry's results and features are too dependent on accurate trees that are complete. If we all had complete, accurate trees, we wouldn't be here! Features that are based solely on DNA and not dependent on trees (AT ALL) would be very helpful.