Take A Look At Your Matches!

You’ll have some close matches but most will be more distant.

Sometimes you can figure out how you match your matches and in other cases, most, in fact, you’ll have no idea whatsoever how you match.

While looking at your matches, look at their trees and also look at their ancestral surnames list. Hopefully, your will recognize some of their names as being some of yours.

Want to do a more extensive mining of your matches to see if you can flush out some of your own Surnames in your list?   

There is a search box on the top right of your match page. Put one of your family names in the box.
The search tool will search three places for your search criteria:

1) The name of your match
Possibly your match has the surname you seek

2) Your match’s ancestral surname list
The surname you seek may be buried in your match’s surname list

3) Your match’s tree

There are two views for each person’s tree:

1) Their pedigree with their direct ancestors shown.

2)The second is their expanded tree showing ancestors, children, siblings and spouses of those relatives.

But, wait a minute……

A lot of your matches don’t have trees and a lot do not list their ancestral surnames. Why would they do that? There are probably several reasons why they do not list their information.

1) Maybe they do not know they are supposed to do the listing
2) Maybe they do not know how to create the listings
3) Maybe they took the DNA test just to see their ethnicity
4) Maybe they are trying to hide
5) Maybe they have no idea how to do genealogy

You might try contacting them. Maybe they have a tree at another location, such as a tree at Ancestry or on another website.

There are plenty of reasons why a person may not have listed their surnames, but, it would benefit everyone, including themselves, if they did.

It will help those who are looking at the matches of others and trying to figure out how their matches match them.

It also helps the person who did list their surnames so others might be able to contact them.

So, how does one upload surnames onto their page?    

On your Personal Page:

1) Click on manage Personal Information
2) Click on Genealogy Tab
3)Click on Surnames Tab In the Add New Surnames box
4)Key in surnames and locations

You can also construct a Tree of your own by going to the My Family Tree button which is on your Personal Page. Once on the My Family Tree Page

1. You can use the Tool Navigator to manually search, create and organize a Family Tree
2. On the top right of the page there is a button to Upload a Gedcom
3. Also, there is a button on the top right to Share Your Family Tree with others