Changes to Ancestry and an exciting find on 23 and Me

I like using Ancestry; I like their search engine as I can get lots of variety in spelling. I also like their DNA. I had settled into a pattern using DNA at Ancestry and their latest change certainly blew that up to put it mildly! But with a few more days of thinking about it I have altered how I look at Ancestry. I had been creating Excel charts to look at my matches for both my husband's accounts and my own accounts. I can see that I could stop doing that and put everything online in my charting. Of course one always wishes that they had started out with this idea but it is never too late to make revisions. It just takes time. I am using the groups function which I had pretty much ignored after it was brought it a few months back. The 24 colours for groups is nice but could be expanded to 32 just to give even more flexibility. I do have some matches that can clearly be linked back solely to one 3x great grandparents' sibling (and more than one of those).

Lately a new cousin came onto my 23 and Me account which has permitted me to verify my Chromosome 23 phasing for my grandparents. What a relief that was as I had rather thought it was correct but some items just did not fit. Reading comments on Chromosome 23 and regarding anything less than 20 cM match as "unsure" I gradually came to the conclusion that this Chromosome is very sturdy and can carry lengths through many generations. For instance this new length that I have (as does one of my brothers thus limiting the match to my mother's side) is 20.2 centimorgans. Although I do not know this individual; and she did not respond to my message, she is matching known Cheatle lines. Sarah Cheatle was my 3x great grandmother and she married William Welch. Their daughter Ann married Henry Christopher Buller. Then their son Edwin Denner Buller married Ellen Taylor. My maternal grandmother thus inherited from her father a blended Chromosome 23 which he had received from his mother Ann Welch and would include both Welch and Cheatle. This discovery very much confirms my phasing and places new emphasis on not using lengths of less than 20 cM to phase the 23rd chromosome. I do have several lengths that one might think would let you establish that a length had come from a particular ancestor. I have overlap with some of my mother's ancestors on her father's side and her mother's side in terms of location which had not really occurred to me until I started to phase the 23rd chromosome.

The other excitement on this Cheatle match is my inability to clearly link my Cheatle line with the other Cheatle lines at Ashby de la Zouch. With these matches I am now in the thought process that my William Cheatle married to Sarah unknown and baptizing my 3x great grandmother Sarah Cheatle at Ashby de la Zouch in 1795 likely married again in the early 1800s as these matches link back to a William Cheatle at Ashby de la Zouch but not to the mother of Sarah Cheatle.