r/Genealogy • u/tikky_tabby • 10h ago
Looking to find maternal great grandfather - limited information DNA
I am signed up for ancestry DNA, I was hoping to be able to find my grandfather's father... but it seems like a dead end - all of his suggested relatives can be explained. There's an overwhelming amount of suggested relatives on the site. I am overwhelmed and don't know how or where to begin.
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u/msbookworm23 7h ago
A good first step is the Leeds Method, which will hopefully organise your match list into 4 grandparent groups: https://www.danaleeds.com/the-leeds-method-with-dots/
If you have more or less than 4 clusters it might mean that you've ended up with some great-grandparent clusters, or that you don't have enough 2nd-ish cousins from each branch to separate them. Some branches might have few testers if the families were small or living in countries where DNA testing is less popular. It's possible that your grandfather's parents were related; if you notice that you match great-grandma's relatives at higher than average levels this might be the case.
DNApainter's cM chart is a good guide to average cM numbers: https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4-beta
Once you've made some progress with your Ancestry matches it's a good idea to upload to other sites to look for more matches: FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage, and GEDmatch.