Experimenting with Mirror Trees Part 2

I left my DNA attached to my dad's name on my mirror tree for 6-7 days now. I have 3 shared ancestor hints. The first match is with my 1st cousin once removed. I manage their test so since his tree has all the same information my tree has, and it is all listed exactly the same way, that isn't surprising that he shows up as a shared ancestor hint. The second shared ancestor hint is a second cousin that I had in my tree prior to finding him as a dna match on Ancestry. So again, not a surprise we are a shared ancestor hint match. The third SAH match is a 4th cousin once removed that we had already figured out what our match is.

So, tonight I am switching my dna to a new mirror tree and a person on DNA Match list that I am not sure where exactly we match. I suspect from the location of his family and the location of my branches that the common ancestor is probably on my dad's maternal line. This DNA cousin also has some names in his tree that are associated with some of the family in my tree on my paternal grandmother's side. But I cant figure out where exactly the common ancestor is. And that is the whole purpose of a mirror tree, discovering who the common ancestor is.

I switched my DNA just before writing this post, and our local Fair starts on Thursday. Since I am on the Fair Board I imagine I will be too busy to do much genealogy until after the fair is over, but that should give ancestry enough time to find some shared ancestor hints. Although, there is a possibility it won't because of the way this DNA cousin added names to his tree. But that is a post for another time.

Recognition of My Blog from Feedspot

On August 1st of this year I received an e-mail notification from Feedspot that my blog was chosen by their panelist as one of the top 25 Family Tree Blogs. I do not know much about Feedspot, but having my blog recognized is nice. They asked that I display this badge on my page.

Their list can be found at: blog.feedspot.com/family_tree_blogs/

Experimenting with Mirror Trees

My first attempt at using a mirror tree wasn't very successful, but I decided to try again.

With my first attempt I was manually entering the information from my DNA matches tree into a new tree on my account. I titled the new tree DNA Mirror Tree. I made it private and non-searchable like you are supposed to do so other people don't see it and get confused.

I think the biggest problem I had was since I was trying to manually enter the info there just wasn't enough information on it to get any shared ancestor hints.

I learned just recently a much easier way to make a mirror tree. I have made my very first video every showing what I learned. you can see it on YouTube at: youtu.be/l0cQLwpII6A It is 28:21 minutes long.

I had my daughter watch it because she has only helped me a little bit and really has no experience working with trees. She said it was "Very informative!" So hopefully newbies and experienced ancestry users will find it helpful.

So using this new method I have created a new mirror tree and will attach my dna to the person who is my DNA match. Then I will give it a week for Ancestry to search its database for DNA matches that have Shared Ancestor Hints with the mirror tree.

I will report back on if I was successful or not. Course part of the problem may be that I am a predicted 4th cousin with this DNA cousin and I watched a video that said mirror trees work best with predicted 2nd and 3rd cousins.