The Case of the Missing Matches

Soon many DNA matches will quietly vanish from our Ancestry DNA match lists. Will you miss any of your matches?

• I will miss Elaine, a 90-something woman who has amazing knowledge about the complex web of our German roots.
• I will miss Mandy, a young mother who may connect with either German or Swedish ancestry, but is a fun contact.
• I will miss Lou, an African-American man who is probably a descendant of my Alexander ancestors, slave owners in South Carolina.

I told you about Lou a year ago in The Case of the Missing DNA. Comparing notes from various DNA tests and web sites, Lou and I discovered that Ancestry had ignored about 10 cM of our matching DNA, placing our match at a low 8 cM.

Now Ancestry plans to drop matches that are under 8 cM. Will I keep Lou as a match? What matches will Lou miss? Will he be able to solve the mystery of his South Carolina roots?

It's a challenge for the descendants of enslaved persons to find ancestors before 1870. Loss of low-level matches will increase the difficulty of finding those distant cousins. In this time of racial enlightenment, Ancestry is moving in the wrong direction.

Instead of hiding matches and ignoring strands of DNA, Ancestry needs to improve their data science capabilities. Yes, as a data scientist, I understand that is easy to say and hard to do. It's time for Ancestry to do the hard work.