New AncestryDNA features

The annual Rootstech Conference starts today in Salt Lake City. Ancestry has conveniently launched some new features to its AncestryDNA product and main Ancestry tree. Two of the features can be found on the top left drop-down under "Extras", and then click on Ancestry Lab. The first feature is called MyTreeTags. This allows one to add labels and tags within your Ancestry tree, creating searchable tags and notes on the Facts pages for the people in your tree.

The next feature is New & Improved DNA Matches. By enabling the feature one can more easily sort, group and view DNA matches. This does seem to be a big improvement. I was able to create color-coded groups for my main family lines and then place DNA matches into the groups that I made. This also highlighted several new matches who had a Common Ancestor with me.

The third new feature is ThruLines, and appears to be a replacement or an evolution of the DNA Circles feature. ThruLines seems to be pretty cool. I have some screen shots below which shows how this looks. Back in August 2017,  I was trying to reverse engineer some AncestryDNA connections on the Amado line. Now when I look up my 5th-great-grandfather Jose Jesus Amado, I can see there are 18 DNA matches on the line of Jose's son Jose Santos Amado, and 10 DNA matches on the line descending from my 4th-great-grandfather Jesus Amado. That's very helpful.

Source: AncestryDNA's new ThruLines feature.

Here's another example. In October 2014 I wrote about an exchange over email with a researcher who was trying to confirm a connection between Arena Louisa Thornhill and my 5th-great-grandmother Sarah Westall Thornhill. This researcher died in 2010. Using the ThruLines feature, I can now visualize the DNA connections descending from Sarah, showing three DNA matches descending from Arena Louisa.

Source: AncestryDNA ThruLines. 

This is incredibly useful for researchers, and can potentially breakdown walls for adoptees. I also compared some of the ThruLines from my AncestryDNA results and those I administer for others in the family. Here's an example of what I see when I look up my 4th-great-grandfather Robert Thomas Jones.

ThruLines result for me.

My sister sees some slightly different matches.

ThruLines result for my sister.

Our Dad's results showed an even larger set of matches. This is expected.

ThruLines result for my Dad.

This is quite an update to the AncestryDNA functionality and I'll have to spend more time looking at this new feature.