(slightly edited on 7 pm eastern time 25 April 2019).
There are reports that ThruLines at AncestryDNA changes data from your tree before it displays it in your ThruLines.
It does. It doesn’t change what’s in your tree.
Information in the white boxes in the ThruLines report is “supposed” to be pulled from the tree associated with the DNA test. Not always.
The ThruLines report for Barbara Siefert indicates that my great-great-grandparents are siblings. They were not. That’s not how I have them in my tree. They have completely different parents. But because one tree has them that way, ThruLines assumes it’s correct. Because the boxes are white the information in those boxes and the relationships are supposed to be in my tree.
Yes John M. Trautvetter is in my tree. Yes Franciska Bieger is in my tree. But the only relationship I have for them in my tree is as husband and wife. ThruLines should at least show this wacky, incorrect, not-in-my-tree relationship for John as a gray box as he’s not listed as Barbara’s son in my tree and he’s not listed as Franciska’s brother in my tree.
Can’t the programmers at AncestryDNA at least have the ThruLines display show garbage that’s not in my tree as gray boxes?
Otherwise it looks like this nonsense is coming from my tree.
Which it’s not. They are’t changing what’s in my tree, but they are claiming information in my ThruLines report is coming from my tree when it’s not.
I don’t doubt my DNA results and my DNA matches, but this sort of nonsense really starts to make me wonder about the coding that goes into some of these things.
Toni says:
Sigh. I know. If we thought the trees were bad before, just wait a week or two. My grandmother is already credited with 2 husbands and an unknown relationship all complete with 23 children. One of my great grandmother’s 2nd husband’s 1st wife’s parents are my great great grandparents?? Don’t think so! The whole idea of thrulines is so bizarre it must have been thought up by a gamer, not a genealogist. If they would stop using trees for the simple reason trees can contain any person the owner puts in them, and stick to DNA matches, everything would be better. I share NO Dna with that 2nd husband. I’m smart enough not to use them but other people take every relationship and make it fit. And that’s why one of my sets of great grandparents have a child born, raised, lived, died in Michigan. There is no such person in my family but I can’t convince the tree owner that she has followed the wrong person.