Orange and Yellow

 

MyHeritage clusters.

Building from Wednesday's look at the autocluster report on MyHeritage, the orange and yellow groups shown above should be considered together. Most of these people seem to be Whitley-Matthews matches, although there's a couple who overlap to the red-green cluster of Flatt and 3GGF matches I investigated earlier in the week. This isn't too surprising as all of these people connect back to the area of Barren and Metcalfe Counties in Kentucky.

Something else interesting is for most of these matches in the orange-yellow group, they only tested or uploaded their results to MyHeritage. There are a few exceptions who might have also tested at Ancestry, which allowed me to identify these people as clearly Whitley-Matthews matches. However, predominantly these matches are only on MyHeritage. This shows the value of using both platforms to identify clusters of matches.

Here's an example. One of the matches in the yellow cluster on MyHeritage is "LZ", who has 215.5 cMs in common with my Mom. That's a solid match. Putting that name into her matches on Ancestry, I see someone with the same name, but on Ancestry's results she has 246 cM in common. Ancestry shows we have a common ancestor at my great-grandparents Thomas Whitley and Elizabeth Hayden Matthews. It takes a little digging, but by looking at her tree, I can see she's a descendant of William C. Whitley, my Grandma Lois' brother.

MyHeritage has a shared DNA matches view, and if I scroll down on LZ's list, I see another Whitley match, also descending from William. He has 177 cM in common with my Mom, and thanks to his tree I can see easily where the connection is between our trees. He's not on Ancestry, so I'd only find this match by using MyHeritage's DNA tools.  

I'm continuing to see this as I look further into the light blue, dark blue and purple groups of matches in the report. Those groups appear to be on my Mom's maternal side (Campuzano, Vasquez, Amado and related matches) of Mexican ancestry. So far, a lot of these people also only seem to be on MyHeritage. There's a few that stand out who I've been able to connect to my tree as Vasquez or Campuzano descendants, so I know I'm on the right track.

It will also be interesting if this autoclustering technique results in four large Leeds Method groups, as that's a subject being covered in our DNA study group too.