For any match large enough to interest me, my practice is to attempt to independently draw up trees based on public sources. It's incredibly time consuming, but necessary as an occasional significant error has turned up.
But it shocks me how often my matches separately share ancestry that is not relevant to the specific MRCA I share with them. Sometimes there is even a hornet's nest of shared relationships pertaining to the same segment (e.g., Donors A and B both descend from Ancestor #1, Donors B and C descend from Ancestor # 2, Donors C and A descend from Ancestor # 3, and these ancestors lived thousands of miles apart at different times and probably weren't even from the same ethnic group, etc.). On one single DNA segment I found something like 5 of these 'non-operative' (i.e., mutually inconsistent) relationships.
Sometimes it makes me wonder how confident a person can be about conclusions. Almost everybody has significant brick walls in some recent branch or other.
But it shocks me how often my matches separately share ancestry that is not relevant to the specific MRCA I share with them. Sometimes there is even a hornet's nest of shared relationships pertaining to the same segment (e.g., Donors A and B both descend from Ancestor #1, Donors B and C descend from Ancestor # 2, Donors C and A descend from Ancestor # 3, and these ancestors lived thousands of miles apart at different times and probably weren't even from the same ethnic group, etc.). On one single DNA segment I found something like 5 of these 'non-operative' (i.e., mutually inconsistent) relationships.
Sometimes it makes me wonder how confident a person can be about conclusions. Almost everybody has significant brick walls in some recent branch or other.
Comment