Page 67 - The Ancestry of Francis Bryan (1770-1863)

DNA MATCHING: CLUSTER GRAPHS AND CHROMOSOME MAPPING
There are a few different ways to organize and compare DNA matches. In 2012 I tried sorting my FTDNA matches on an Excel spreadsheet which included the match's name, the number of the shared chromosomes and my best guess as to the common ancestor. Ultimately this was very time consuming and did not lead me anywhere. There were no family trees associated with the DNA matches on FTDNA at the time. It was hard to know which branch of my family was shared with the match without being able to compare our trees. Impossible to find the common ancestor.
In my humble opinion, FTDNA has not improved significantly in this department. There are still very few trees and searching them is nearly impossible.
My more recent adventures with DNA matching have been much more fruitful. The easiest method and the one that has produced the best information for me has been Ancestry’s ThruLines. As long as you do not trust anything that an Ancestry.com tree says on face value, and do the proper research, ThruLines is a marvel! But always remember my 80% inaccuracy estimate on Ancestry.com.
I have also been using a few other resources.
A version of the Collins Leeds Method of clustering DNA matches is probably the second most useful tool I have found. It is not possible for me to manually perform the Collins Leeds
Method. I have great patience for many things, but it appears that this is not one of them. Way too time consuming for me. I am researching my tree at the level of my fifth great grandparents, after all!
There are quite a few different programs/websites, including DNAGedcom and MyHeritage which can produce a cluster graph if you have your DNA on their site. There is also Genetic Affairs which can produce the cluster graph by importing information from Ancestry.com, 23andMe and MyHeritage. These sites are good if you are looking for ancestors with whom you share 30-40 cM of DNA or more.They do not work well for smaller cM matches.
My current research needs to focus very specifically on these smaller matches from about 6 cM to 40 cM because they ARE further back on my tree.
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