Ancestry Pro Tools

[AInightingale]

Does anyone have any experience of this 'enhanced' feature of Ancestry? Does it estimate the relationship between your shared matches (eg 'Joe Bloggs and Jane Smith are probably first cousins' - My Heritage does this) indicate a common ancestor/triangulation, or does it just sort the matches into clusters?

Also, it's £7.99 a month - I assume you can just cancel this bit instead of cancelling your whole contract? It's not very clear.

Yes it estimates the relationship between shared matches. You can sort by relationship to either them or you.
No it doesn't suggest a common ancestor beyond what you already get with thrulines.
I don't have any clusters in my matches but some people do.

I'm pretty sure you can cancel separately from your main contract. (so you can subscribe for a month at a time) What you can't do is keep Pro Tools if you cancel your main contract.

Thanks!

Its definitely worth it for the indepth stuff and has made a huge difference to how much further I've been able to progress. But its pricey.

I’m interested in this - what kind of advantage do the Pro Tools give you over just manually working out which of your matches are also linked to other shared matches (which is what I’m currently doing)?

if you click on a match and then the 'shared matches' tab, it will then give the cM said match shares with all the other people you have in common, and will estimate the relationship between them.

It's useful if matches don't have trees (as so many on Ancestry don't. or they have a frankly useless one) or won't respond to messages (again, common). If you learn that Bill Bloggs is likely to be Joe Soap's uncle, and Joe Soap has a viewable tree, you can see better where mystery matches might fit in. It helped with my research a good bit. It also established that some matches were actually siblings - say I was matching to one estimated as a first cousin 1R and one as a second - things like that can really throw you, but it's just down to a variation in cM and totally random.

Without pro-tools you see the estimate of how you are related to your matches.

With pro-tools you see this AND you can see how your match is related to your shared matches.

So I am matched to Bob and Joe. If I click on Bob I can see he is estimated to be my 2nd cousin once removed. His profile also shows he is estimated to be Jo's cousin.

Even if Bob and Joe only have partial tree, knowing what their relationship is likely to be means you can identify where they connect and work back from that point. It then makes it easier to identify your common ancestors because you have two points to work backwards to a common point - as you can triangulate. If you are unsure of part of your tree, you can use these matches to construct a separate tree which you know connects somehow to you.

If you have three or four people who are all related to you and each other, you have a cluster you can work from.

It's useful if you don't know an ancestor OR you know a name but can't distinguish which person with the same name you are trying to identify. It also helps to link in people who don't necessarily have a tree at all.

It basically gives you alternative starting points to find a common ancestor.

For me it was game changing in terms of how useful your matches are.

I am hoping that the new cluster feature will also aid with this when it comes off beta and you can customise.

I love it. But you have to really be interested in family history and getting in-depth with tracing ancestors (or have a particular dead end you want to solve). It's helped me break several brick walls I otherwise might now have worked out. It's not one for beginners - it's immediate to advanced. And you probably need to have the time to invest in making the most of it.

One of things that throws me in addition to this is how the relationship estimation sometimes isn't the same in both directions.

Bob can appear as a uncle to John but John appears as a grandchild to Bob. So you have to be a little careful with it and match the paperwork with the DNA. But it narrows down possibilities massively.

If anyone is trying to use the Leeds Method, it's absolutely essential imo. You don't have your tree as a starting point so you have to find another one. If you have two or three people who you can identify a common ancestors for who you know from your cM values must also be your common ancestor, you can figure it out. By expanding their shared tree to look at siblings and build a tree downwards you'll eventually come across your missing link. You must be related somehow so it's a case of finding the person who fits your timeline and their timeline and cM values.

Update.

Over the weekend they've expanded the clusters feature on pro-tools.

I'm still getting to grips with it, but it looks like it takes a lot of the hard work out of the Leeds Method.

I have found Pro Tools to be a total game changer. I’m involved in 3 cases currently. Case 1 is one of my matches who is adopted. Highest match on any platform is 113cM (Ancestry’) and Y DNA hasn’t come up anything, Knowing how many cM matches share has been invaluable and we are a lot further than we would be without it. Clusters unfortunately don’t work on him which is a shame. A shared match on each of his highest 2 matches came up once I started Pro Tools which has been very helpful confirming which line he is connected to on his highest match.

Case 2 it has been really helpful with as it shows amongst other things that for a couple of people their trees do not match their DNA which wouldn’t have known without Pro Tools.

Case 3 I started on yesterday. Highest match is 56cM from a population who don’t test much. She is looking for her maternal grandmother. I think I have identified a couple who are most likely 2nd or 3rd great grandparents on that line so have at least a starting point now. She has paperwork somewhere with a couple of possible candidates so we can see whether what I have found with Pro Tools might be able to be linked in with either of them. Probably not but I am a lot further in 24 hours than I would have been if I didn’t have it.