ThruLines on Ancestry

I have been working on my 5^th great grandmother Elizabeth Lighthall’s ThruLines connections. Below is an image of my connections and of the 23 connections, 4 of them are me and my siblings. I was wondering why my half-brother wasn’t showing and his son, since they have also tested and have trees. I see them listed under my mother.

I went to my brother results, which my nephew gave me permission to view. I see that my nephew attached him to a private tree as someone else. I am guessing, he is working on a genealogy project and I know things can get revealed when you do this. However, why is he still showing attached to me via my mother, could it be because my nephew is attached to the correct biological tree and he shows him as his father? Upon closer examination of my mother’s ThruLines, this is exactly what is showing. My DNA matches have a little blue and white dna icon.  My brother’s name doesn’t show this same icon. He shows as a DNA match in my matches, but because his tree doesn’t match mine, I don’t have a “Common Ancestors” hint.

I decided to check my Thrulines connections for Elizabeth’s daughter, Elizabeth Sponable and sure enough my Nephew appears. Elizabeth Sponable would be the last generation of ThruLines that my nephew has. So is this the reason why he doesn’t show up on my 5^th generation? If so, this is very disappointing, because as I get older, and younger generations are testing, this means that younger generations are dropping off my ThruLines. Trying to use logic from my programmer days, they must only generate the same number of generations for every ThruLines participate. This means, that you might have DNA matches that have trees, but since you are different generations and your common ancestor is beyond their ThruLines limitations, you won’t see them.

In spite of this limitation, ThruLines can still be a valuable tool. It has let me figure out exactly how some of my matches fit into my tree.  When I work on my ThruLines, I start at our common ancestor and work backwards down to the living, using records. Then I go back to the ThruLines and see if I can follow their path back to them. A lot of times, my lines do go down further than them. Thus, if these younger generation test and show up on my match list, and they have a tree with some of their ancestors, I might find them or their ancestors in my tree. ThruLines and “Common Ancestors” hints are directly related to each other. I haven’t checked all my “Common Ancestors” hints to see if they stopped at the 5^th generation of my ancestors. However, at first glance it appears to be they do.

Now I wonder what would happen, if I linked myself to my grandmother. Would it take my ancestor’s matches back two more generations? I might want to try this with my sister’s DNA which I manage and see what happens. I know matches and things don’t always update very fast, so I would lose using her matches while I try that logic out.

On a final note, testing my siblings has been beneficial. They match people beyond the second cousin stage that I don’t therefore their Thrulines bring up matches I might not have.