MODULE 2: Grouping activity and recapping your activies to date

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You'll now be sorting your matches into groups. You might have initially sorted to your paternal (P0) and maternal (M0) lines and then moved to your four grandparent lines - P1/4, P5/8, M1/4 and M5/8. You might also be now breaking down your groups further.

You'll probably have a few groups of matches that you can't allocate to the P1/4, P5/8, M1/4 and M5/8 groups and you'll be creating research groups eg _PUK1 and _MUK1. My hint is to limit your unknown groups to no more than six groups. Ungrouped matches can either be left for later grouping or placed in high level group eg P0, M0,  _UK#, _UKP# and/or _UKM#. I also use US or UK for "unknown side".

Remember that I use symbol at the front of the research groups so they don't get mixed amongst the P and M groups. UK and US will appear after the P and M groups.

The P0 and M0 groups can also be used for matches without share matches. There can be many matches below 30cM in this group. If you ever exhaust researching your higher matches, you could then research these matches! Bear in mind that, for many of these smaller matches, your common ancestor with these matches are beyond second great grandparents.

Remember that practice makes perfect with grouping. You should also read the blog posts closely as there's lots of useful information in them. 

Here's an activity that you can attempt to see if you've got the hang of the grouping methodology I use.


Over the last couple of weeks, we've been working through the stages of the iterative process that we need to follow when we're working with AncestryDNA. There have been exercises for you to do and plenty of demonstrations so that you can apply the process to your AncestryDNA test. Here's a recap of where you should be at leading into Module 3.


Finally, I would encourage you to read Philippa Shelly Jones' two part article on solving her mystery AncestryDNA matches-

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