Page 79 - The Ancestry of Francis Bryan (1770-1863)

Group Four (dark green dot) looks at the ICW matches between the five descendants of Francis Bryan and Phoebe Woodruff and excludes everyone else. There are fewer of these matches, but they are there.
Now. If every single tree on Ancestry.com was complete and perfect I could have nearly 100% confidence in these relationship because I would be able to fully research each dot on the graph. Unfortunately, in many, if not most cases, the trees are non-existent or only contain a few people. Shelley does produce an excel spreadsheet which shows the user name of each match and if they have a tree on Ancestry, including the number of people in the tree. This enables me to not waste a lot of time looking up matches without useful trees. With tree verification, I have been able to confirm that the descendants of Francis and his two brothers match many Strode descendants (some of the many pink dots).
"DIRTY TREES"
Even if a tree has only a few people I can sometimes use those few people and build a tree of my own. This kind of tree is called a "dirty tree" and one that needs to be kept private as I do not try to authenticate any of the information. I just try to make it somewhat logical and see if it can lead me to some common ancestors. I do not spend too much time on these trees. If one proves fruitful it is because I am able to find the intersection with my tree. At that point I will spend time corroborating the information on that tree and copy the information to my tree.
OTHER TOOLS: GENETIC AFFAIRS AND DNA PAINTER
I mentioned Genetic Affairs previously. This site has a few tools that I have found very helpful. They perform Collins Leeds clustering with information from any of three sites: 23andMe, Family Tree DNA, and Ancestry.com. But what I have recently found even more useful is what they call their "AutoTree."
Here is their description of these tools:
Unleash your DNA cousins
Genetic Affairs offers the AutoCluster tool which groups together your DNA matches into clusters of matches that most likely descend from common ancestors.
AutoTree identifies common ancestors and reconstructs genealogical trees based on the trees of DNA matches from AutoCluster clusters. AutoCluster and AutoTree can help in the identification of unknown ancestors (for instance an unknown great grandfather) or assist persons with unknown parentage to their birth families....
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