Bit and pieces: Match numbers, Second cousins, DNA clusters, and Ancestor Score

Match Numbers

As anticipated, the numbers of new DNA matches at Ancestry have been increasing over the last few of weeks - I now have a total of 20,066 matches, up from 20,003 on the 31st January. The numbers of close matches have also increased - following the two new ones during January, there was a loss of one in the first few days of February, so my current total of 379 actually represents four new matches in the "close" category so far this year.

Second Cousins

What I wasn't anticipating was that, just a few days after posting the comparisons between my first and second cousins, I'd gain a new, and relevant, second cousin!  

I have updated the previous table with the shared DNA and Ancestry predictions:

I can confirm that matches 6 and 7 are siblings, thanks to the protools. So, once again, this is a second cousin relationship that shows much less DNA than would be expected, based on the predictions.

DNA clusters

I was interested to see that one of the shared matches with this new 2c connects to what I call a 'splurge' cluster - a large group of matches who all seem to match each other.  

You can see an example of this with the "Group 29" on my post here. 

That's an old post, from when the number of matches was much less than it is now (I only had fifty nine 'close' matches then!) But it illustrates the point of how the shared matches cluster together, and how some of those clusters are much larger than others. 

In this case, there are 172 other shared matches between us, as opposed to just the sixteen matches I share with my second cousin.

Although there has been debate over the years as to what these large clusters represent, I've often wondered whether they could be caused by moderately recent ancestors, whose descendants emigrated to America as part of the Mormon migrations, and who now have a large number of descendants over there.  

So I was very interested to see that this match connects back to ancestors in Utah.  

And, although they aren't showing any connections back to the UK in their tree, I recognise the family they connect to as one that I looked at briefly many years ago, when Ancestry was producing "Circles" and "New Ancestor Discoveries":

  

The particular match does only share 14cM with me - which I know is low and, without any other clues, I would not normally research such a match (or the associated cluster). 

But this does make me think I should be taking another look at the Herefordshire ancestors of those people in the cluster, to see if I can identify my connection back to them - which, potentially, might only be in the early 1800s.

Ancestror Score

One of the things I had hoped to do, in a post today, was to revisit something called an "Ancestor Score".  I first posted about this on Valentine's Day back in 2015 here.  I'd seen the idea on another blog and thought it would be a great way of keeping track of progress, not just on my family history and identified ancestors, but also, by including that extra column, on monitoring my identified DNA matches, as well.

At that time I was expecting to make progress with my genealogy as I took part in the "Genealogy Do-Over".  But life got in the way, as it has a habit of doing! 

I've decided against attempting to produce a quickly updated chart - although there has been some progress over the intervening years, much of it hasn't been as fully documented, and evidenced, as I'd like it to be, so I don't feel it counts. 

Now that I have dropped some of my other activities, and really do plan to make progress this year, I am going to repeat that 2015 table here instead, to lay it down as a 'baseline'.

The proof of progress will be in next year's post on Valentine's Day!