When it's Time to Compare

 

Could a simple change of background color be all it takes to make me sit up and take notice of surroundings? 

Since I've been working on my father-in-law's Kelly ancestors, I thought I'd take a peek at the latest DNA matches via Ancestry's ThruLines tool. As I always do, I clicked on the icon for Ancestry, then chose the drop-down menu for DNA results to select ThruLines. I was on a mission to find all Kelly matches and nothing was going to get in my way.

I thought.

How is it that a little change of color on the website's display can suddenly make an oh-so-familiar screen look completely different? I clicked on ThruLines on that drop-down menu, but a different looking page came up. It was labeled "DNA Compare."

Hmmm, I thought, That's not what I was looking for. Must have clicked the wrong choice, I thought. I'll go back and try again.

That's when I saw it: the "NEW" button next to the word "Compare." 

Funny, I hadn't noticed that before—but a Google search told me the Ancestry blog had written up that "DNA Compare" on February 24, 2023. How did I miss that?

For the most part, the offerings under "DNA Compare" include "Regions"—comparing estimated ethnicity percentages with selected DNA matches—and "Ancestral Journeys," which focuses on immigrant communities' destinations or origins. In addition, for a limited time, a third comparison is made with "world class athletes," possibly a nod to this past summer's newsworthy sporting events.

While those categories were admittedly fun to peruse, I didn't find any eye-opening stunners. There was really no surprise to learn that I share similar ethnic backgrounds with those close relatives who also decided to test their DNA at Ancestry.com. Perhaps if I had been an adoptee still struggling to determine the identity of my birth parents, this might have been a useful tool. At this point, though, I'd peg such offerings as similar to what, in a previous century, might have been called "parlor games." Fun divertissement but not really useful.

On the other hand, being able to compare what our matches share with each other on a more basic level would be helpful. That, however, is the domain of a different set of offerings: the Ancestry Pro Tools. I haven't sprung for that additional cost yet, intending first to wring out all the information already available to me concerning those DNA matches. I prefer to complete the basic work first before upgrading.

Meanwhile, chasing those elusive Kelly roots may indeed call for a DNA assist, but I'll first be doing my comparisons with the basic tools available. For those whose intent in testing was to do the work in finding matches based on centiMorgan counts and large segments of shared genetic material, what's needed to complete the task is, for the most part, already there.

As I work through the matches, I'm not finding any surprises yet, but I did notice there weren't very many matches linked to this Kelly line to begin with: only eight for my father-in-law's Kelly line, compared with over two hundred matches for one of my mother-in-law's ancestral lines. Sometimes, there just aren't enough candidates out there for comparisons, no matter how impressive—or fun—the available research tools may be.