Just a couple of updates

Thanks to Amy Faye Webb Faircloth Jacquess for taking a DNA test and linking it to the CE South Family Tree! I am working through her 305 Common Ancestor Hints on Ancestry.com and so far her matches are to common ancestors already on our database of common ancestors for the six of us: me, Bob South, Michael Wilson-South, Elaine Lee, Lee South and now Amy Faye. It still helps cement our relationships to those I am covering in this blog with more matches, so I am grateful for her help. She and Lee South are one generation up from the other four of us, so between the two of them there have been matches further back than we had before, making those two especially helpful.

Ancestry.com has DNA kits on sale for $59.99 for a few days. They will usually do another sale around Mothers Day and Fathers Day, so if price is keeping you from spitting in the tube, you should check it out. Once you have the test, you can link it to a tree if you have one, but if not, please consider linking it to my trees, the South Pope Family Tree or the CE South Family Tree. We can get that done on the phone once your test is back. Then your explained matches will help with our South family's knowledge of our ancestors back to 7x or 8x great grandparents in most cases.

A third thing to mention is that as Ancestry.com grows in DNA results, they are trying new ways to show connections between matches besides (and I hope not instead of...) the common ancestor hints. The latest Beta thing they have is called ThruLines. The English teacher in me dislikes using Thru for Through, but putting that aside, I have found it interesting and a bit helpful with the little work I have done looking at it. They start with your parents and then show you all your grandparents through 5x great grandparents. Since we are pretty well set on South grandparents back even further than that, I am not sure how much this new feature will add to the trees or this blog, but I will say for the individuals whose DNA results I have permission to access, it might add information about the other side of their family. As luck would have it, in my case it has presented some possible chinks in some brick walls on my Gray side of the tree, but not without some pesky fact matching problems. As they say, it's always something! I am reserving judgement on this feature because the common ancestor hints have been so useful to me, and I hope they don't replace that feature with ThruLines, letting them both continue to provide information to researchers.