I’m still playing with the AncestryDNA circles that are showing up on my results.

While I realize the circles are still in “beta,” I’m still not certain how helpful they will be for me at this point as entry into the “circle” is contingent upon the user submitting a tree in addition to their DNA. I’m more interested in what “circles” some of my treeless or incomplete tree matches fall as I can figure the ones with trees out.

It is the people who have no trees or significant gaps in their trees that I’d like to establish specific connections for. I’ve used the shared match feature of AncestryDNA in an attempt to do this, focusing on DNA submitters whose identity and relationship I know and trying to see what other matches we share. There are some difficulties with this as once the connection gets beyond a certain point all descendants do not necessarily share DNA.

It could just be that my family is not that representative.

I’m also curious about the circles when it starts pulling in more of my double and triple cousins. I have quite a few of relatives who fall into this category. Our connections in many cases are not that far back. A fair number of my maternal relatives and I have two or three sets of ancestors who are siblings in the great-grandparent through great-great-great-grandparent generation. That’s close enough that we may share DNA on multiple branches. I have one triple cousin who is already in two of my circles.

But couldn’t Ancestry.com have created this “circle” concept before they had DNA?  After all, it is using the trees submitted by users as a key part of the process.