Common Ancestors

Have you identified common ancestors for your DNA matches? If so, do you know how many of your DNA matches have a common ancestor identified? My answers to these questions is YES, I’ve tried to document them, but NO I had no idea how many of my matches have a common ancestor identified.

That is until a magical spreadsheet was shared by Chris Ferraiolo in the WikiTree Members Group.

I knew that I could select all and copy my match list. However, when I paste that information into Excel, it puts each piece of data on a new line instead of creating a row of data for each match.

That’s where the ‘magic’ of George Clarke’s spreadsheet comes in. I simply paste my copied info into one cell of his spreadsheet and it transforms all of that data into rows — one row of data per match.

I then copied these rows of data into my own spreadsheet. This allows me to save this list of matches outside of Ancestry. The one drawback to this process is getting to the end of your match list. Pressing the page down key is the fastest way to get there. However, it can take quite some time to reach the end. Thus, I elected to only do this with those matches with an identified common ancestor.

Once in the spreadsheet, I can determine how many common ancestors each of the tests I manage have.

• Test 1 – 1578 common ancestor matches
• Test 2 – 1504 common ancestor matches
• Test 3 – 1505 common ancestor matches
• Test 4 – 1775 common ancestor matches

Thank you Chris Ferraiolo for creating and sharing this tool!