Shared enhanced matches is a new feature at Ancestry under their Pro Tools. They are helpful in ferreting out matches or identifying matches with no trees by associating them close matches that do have trees.
In my previous Blog, I looked at the Butler ThruLines for two of my wife’s late aunts. It turns out that recent revisions to the Butler tree have made a lot of my older Blogs obsolete. Here is one of my wife’s Aunt Lorraine’s matches:
Lorraine’s match with Will is interesting as it brings us back an additional generation from what we had. Here are Lorraine and Will’s shared matches:
These are shared matches where will also matches Lorraines match by at least 20 cM. There are more matches going down. Virginia is Lorraine’s sister. Barbara descends from Edward Butler and his son George. Brian descends from Edward’s brother George of Cincinnati as does Patty. The blue dots for Charles and Jennifer mean that I have not looked at these matches. There are additional matches not shown above.
This is one way that it could work. Charles is a shared match with Lorraine and Will, but he has no tree posted. I choose Charles to get his shared matches:
Charles is in the the second cousin range compared to Bobbi. I know that Bobbi descends from Mary Ann. She was the son of George Butler of Cincinnati. She moved to St. John, New Brunswick and had a family. That means that Charles must be related to the New Brunswick side of the Butler family. In fact, Charles is from Halifax, Nova Scotia:
Here is the relationship between the two places:
Bobbi is on the bottom left of the image above. She is with two other DNA matches from the New Brunswick Branch started by Mary Ann Butler. Mary Ann’s sister Rebecca remained in the Cincinnati area.
Lorraine and Will’s Shared Match Jennifer
Jennifer also has no tree, but I shared match between her and Lorraine does:
Based on other matches, the link is probably on the Kirwin side:
Maureen and Lorraine are related to Michael, but Michael is much more closely related to Maureen:
Michael’s 2nd great-grandfather was from Waterford:
This may be the connection. I believe that Maureen and family are from New Jersey.
Lorraine and Patty’s Shared Match List
Patty is one of Lorraine’s biggest matches from the Cincinnati Branch:
Jeremiah is the first on page 2 of Lorraine and Patty’s Shared Match List, but he is already on my Butler DNA/Genealogy Chart. James is someone new. Here is James’ Family Tree on his maternal side:
I see three Butlers. Richard Butler was from Wexford and Adam Butler is a name that comes up in the new Butler genealogy. This is worth tracking, so I’ll create my own tree for James focusing in on the Butler connection. Even better, I contacted a Butler relative in England and he assures me that his tree is right for the Butler part.
Here is James added to the Butler DNA/Genealogy Chart:
Here are the shared connections by DNA:
A Peek at MyHeritage
Lorraine has a match with Marie at MyHeritage:
Marie’s tree has some familiar names:
I’ve added Marie to my Butler Chart:
I didn’t check Marie’s tree, but I’m guessing that it is right. One good thing about MyHeritage is that they show where the match is between Lorraine and Marie:
Here I added that information to Lorraine’s profile:
This is the first Butler DNA I’ve added for Lorraine and it goes back to the 1700’s. I even have an unknown category. Hopefully that will be identified at some point.
Summary and Conclusions
- It was helpful looking at enhanced shared matches. I don’t always find out who the match is if they don’t have a tree, but I get a much better idea of what branch of the family they are from.
- I was able to enlarge my Butler DNA/Genealogy Tree. This is a tree of DNA matches that also show an ancestral connection.
- I looked at one match at MyHeritage and was able to map it to Lorraine’s profile using DNAPainter.
- This is still more searching to be done for matches at Ancestry, MyHeritage, FTDNA, and Gedmatch.