04 May 2016

Ancestry.com DNA: Then v. Now

It appears that the changes to Ancestry.com's DNA matching protocol have reached my results.  Oh, dear: 

19 Missing ... that's 20%...



Following all the alerts from other bloggers, I made sure that all of my existing 93 green leaf matches had stars and/or notes*.  As you can see above, now I have only 90 green leaf matches.  Doesn't sound too bad, does it?  But, examining those 90, there are 16 with no star and no note but with a new blue dot ... they are entirely new to me.  

So, a total of 19 of my "Then" DNA matches who had trees with a match to my tree are no longer in that category. I haven't looked exhaustively for them, but it seems likely that they are indeed "gone." I assume ancestry.com did not change my tree or their trees, so if they are no longer among the green leaf DNA matches, they must no longer match my DNA at/above the threshold.  So much for starring or noting previous matches....

Other signs of change
I selected, fairly randomly,  6 of my "then" matches and looked at Ancestry.com's specification of shared cM's now.  All of them have been modified:

A Decision
I'm glad ancestry.com wants my opinion and I will give it to them, but I'm not sure it really matters to them.  They don't appear to have listened to the Power Bloggers....

I've decided that I'm not going to give these changes any more of my time and energy right now.  I'll wait to read some blogs and I'm very interested to hear all the talk at SCGS Jamboree DNA Day.


* I followed many more of the precautionary suggestions, but I don't have the strength to analyze comparisons of them now...if ever....