Mossie's Musings

In this activity, you're placing yourself (the target/tester) into a well known tree - your own well researched tree!  Chose one of your great-great-grandparent couples where you have a group of known AncestryDNA matches who have that couple as your MRCA. Build a WATO tree from the great-great-grandparent couple out to each of the matches where your shared DNA is less than 400cM and enter the cM you share with these matches. Select "switch to beta probabilities" - do this whenever you're using AncestryDNA matches, Use the "Suggest Hypothesis" function at WATO and delete any hypotheses that don't meet the "time and place" criteria. Which hypothesis are you? Is it the strongest hypothesis? Now include any matches where your shared DNA is between 400cM and 1500cM and enter the cM you share with these matches.  Use the "Regenerate Hypothesis" function at WATO and delete any hypotheses that don't meet the "time and place" cri

These notes are for participants in the Society of Australian Genealogists' program,  Analysing your AncestryDNA results . Others are welcome to use these notes for their personal research. Please contact me at  chrisw9953[at]gmail[dot]com for other uses.  I'll strive to update the notes as there are further developments or my understanding of the area grows. Remember that WATO is useful to record the relationship between your DNA matches where they share common ancestors. Using WATO to examine hypotheses is a more advanced technique that will take time to understand. From reading, watching and looking at WATOs, these are a few things I keep in my mind as I develop WATOs. The fact that WATO only looks at one ancestral line leads into the search for the two ancestral lines to add important evidence of the relationship between the target and DNA matches.   Working out the relationship with a DNA match This can be difficult because- There’s a range in the amount of shared DNA for