My DNA Statistics from Ancestry.com

Yesterday I presented a talk at our local genealogical society, Cottage Grove Genealogical Society, about Working with Ancestry DNA Results. As part of that presentation, I showed how my number of matches had increased over the past 6 months.

	March 2017	9 August 2017	6 September 2017
Shared Ancestor Hints	139	152	158
Starred matches	50	60	61
4th Cousins or Closer	835	1209	1260
DNA Circles	22	25	26

The starred matches are marked by me, so that is my own doing. I mark those who I believe I know how they are related to me.

The others are calculated by Ancestry. Both Shared Ancestor Hints and DNA Circles require that my DNA matches also have a tree that matches mine and they have linked their DNA results to their tree. You can see that those numbers are not increasing all that rapidly.

The 4th Cousins or Closer numbers are strictly from the amount of DNA that we match. These numbers do continue to go up. As of today, that number is 1277. My total matches including more distant cousins are a little over 37,000. That is way too many to try to work with.

My major goal for working with DNA matches is to make cousin connections so we can share and compare information, sometimes including photos. Having over 100 shared ancestor hints gives me lots of opportunities to try to connect with cousins, so it is now up to me to do that.