After another poster pointed to an error I made in another thread I began today, I am offering a suggestion for Ancestry to consider with regard to the "View Full Tree" button.

As we know, when we see our list of matches there will be a male or female icon and a name. When we click on the "Review Match" button we are taken to a page with the ethnicity chart, a list of surnames and a partial tree in the pedigree view with your match appearing as the home person. If you and your match are distant relatives, your common ancestor is likely to have been too many generations back to show up on this truncated tree.

If you want to go deeper in your match's tree you will next click the "View Full Tree" button. I had wrongly assumed that by clicking on that button I would be taken to a fuller version of my match's tree, with my match appearing as the home person as they had in the truncated version, even though the tree's creator may have designated someone else as the actual home person. The problem arises when your match is not the actual home person. If you haven't noticed you may end up searching for the common ancestor not within the ancestral lines of your match, but rather within the ancestral lines of their spouse, with whom you would not share any DNA.

This has happened to me on several occasions so I assume that it has happened to others. If the company has the technology to show us a truncated view of our match's tree with our match appearing as the home person,it should be able to show us a full version of that same tree with our match still appearing as the home person. Until and unless this situation ever changes and you don't seem to be finding many common ancestors in the trees of your matches, make sure when searching in the Full Tree that you are looking within the lines of your match and have not unknowingly been switched over to the lines of their spouse.

Michael