Posts

Showing posts with the label Ancestry
Image
I have a match on Ancestry and it says we don’t share any matches.   How could that be? I see this question come up several times a month in the various Facebook genealogy groups.   Well, there are four scenarios that can give rise to this situation, so let’s go through each of them. 1.       Ancestry sets a threshold of 20 cM for displaying shared matches.   That is, the shared match would have to share at least 20 cM with you and 20 cM with your match to be displayed as a shared match.   So if you’re down in the weeds of your matches and looking to find shared matches with donors who only match you at 10 cM, it’s possible you might find some, but what’s also pretty likely is that the segment that you inherited from your common ancestor is smaller than 20 cM, and while there may be many donors that match both you and your match on that segment, none of them match you at 20 cM (and most probably don't match your match to that degree either).  See the below diagram