Slow and Steady, Building Clusters

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Madrid, 13 May 2017.

Like the group of turtles above, from Madrid's Atocha train station, I am slowly building reliable clusters of DNA matches. This hasn't been easy, but would not have been possible without the shared matches of matches feature in AncestryDNA's ProTools. The genetic genealogists and researchers who have made this possible deserve a round of applause and more. I didn't think it was possible to break through some of these research walls that I've had for so long, and yet, with this new set of tools, I think I am really close.

Using my Dad's DNA matches on both Ancestry and MyHeritage, I've been able to filter from among almost 20,000 total matches down to about 71 matches on the John O'Brien-Bridget side of the tree. About 40 of those matches (and growing) belong to the James O'Brien cluster. The other 31 should be connected in some way with Bridget's mystery side of the tree. There's quite a few in that group with ancestors who were from Longford and Roscommon, so that gives me some hope that I am on the right track.