Any thoughts? For those who do ancestry dna

[BramblyHedge]

I am into ancestry and did the dna test a year ago. I have been doing my tree for years and some parts are more robust than others but for most lines I have gone back at least 200 years and more on others. I have a puzzle with my dna results which is driving me nuts.

I am basically British with some Western Europe. My results show a bit more Ireland and Scots than I’d expect but i know these things aren’t accurate. The things is I have loads and loads (50+) of 4-6 (and some 5-8c) cousin matches to a very extended family from North Carolina which seems to be mainly mayflower era descendants. By extended I mean reallly extended in that some of them are linked to each other 200+ years back. I can’t even work out how they all relate to each other but the same names keep cropping up and someone else has done a lot of reasearch in this family. I have dna links to many strands of this family. But where we have shared dna links I am the only one who isn’t American or from America. No other shared British or European matches comes up for these (which I thought would be the case if it was someone who emigrated c. 250 years ago and had descendants on both continents). Which leads me to wonder if I have a more recent ancestor who was from North Carolina and came over here? They seemed to intermarry a lot so not sure if that is squeing the dna result and it is in fact an ancestry from longer back. Anyway it is making my brain hurt so thought I’d see if anyone else had similar oddness with their results. The closest match is 26cm over 2 segments which I know isn’t close but I have founds loads of 6th cousins on about 8cm. And yes I know it doesn’t really matter :-)

I don't think that the 1940s theory works as I share DNA with hundreds of them from this same tree. I think I will never know - though it may explain my 3% Germanic Europe as loads of them originate from there.

I've got 15 countries in my DNA and some ancestors in the congo.
I was born in England and for 200 years all English, Welsh or Scottish.
I have been doing mine for 20 years, too, you never finish.
I'm not sure what the answer is, I just categorise mine.

I have Romany, Romany Europe only, maybe (could be links to my father) don't know because it isn't obvious, and no shared matches.
As I check one off I dump it in a category.

I have 49,000 matches. Quite a lot of these are 4-6 with some 5-8 matches too.

You'll have DNA up to ten generations ago, they might not be shared ancestors, or you might not find this for years.

I have found it pretty accurate comparing with family members who have he same/ very similar DNA, from other companies too.

That is useful to know. I am not as English as I expected. My paternal gm is from east London as far back as I can see and that was a bit of a melting pot so I am assuming this is going to be on her side (my mother has done DNA and paternal gf was very Welsh which is in my DNA). I am also categorising but by link to ggp where known. How do you do it?

I do it on ancestry but there's lots of different ways. You could just do a spreadsheet and make your own fitting categories.
I'm not very tech savvy though, I get by but uploading files and trusting I've done everything right is difficult for me.