People who have been using ancestry a long time will recognize these issues as ones they have seen variations of before. The DNA is just the latest layer.

I ran into problems when I first did the DNA testing that the naming of ancestors was not distinguishing between people in my tree who were related and who were part of my husband's family. I actually separated out his family from my tree in an effort to deal with this. At first I was concerned they thought I was a part of my husband's family but his ethnicity is entirely different heavily weighted with French and German while my original test showed no French and German.

Concerning the consolidation comments, I complained years ago that merges using tree hints were grabbing odd information. In regard to determining the same ancestor, this has been an ongoing issue also. One tree might have Fred while twenty had Barney as a name of a child and yet the tree merge would pick up the oddity of Fred instead of the expected Barney. Like others I stopped merging profiles from other trees but many people did not. To my knowledge they never fixed the problem. I am not bashing trees here. I am saying the tools or processes ancestry provided for people to use with their trees had some issues that frequently reappear. There have been ongoing issues with the relationship calculator providing odd relationships, including relationships to spouses of ancestors rather than the ancestor.

Newcomers may not understand what I am saying but there are old threads on these boards posted by some bright individuals complaining of things that bear a striking resemblance to the concerns expressed above.

It looks like this is not a DNA issue but the unresolved issues affecting processes around trees arising in a new way now associated with the DNA. DNA would not confuse spouses.

People have made many foolish choices in the past with trees but there have also been problems caused by ancestry's process itself. A sort of translation type of problem in the interpretation of information. It appears this is a problem not with the DNA but with associating the DNA with names in trees and unfortunately the issues with the processes associated with trees are still coming through.