Disappearing Common Ancestors
 

I hide most of my matches. Those I retain, I make notes about and colour code.

This week I had a new common ancestor match. Someone who has four ancestors in their tree, matches nobody amongst my matches, but does appear to shine a light on my mysterious Pierce ancestors.

I've done a flurry of research, and in so doing, have snapped whatever link it was.

Now, I don't know whether this was a false dawn or a genuine connection. But it does indicate that we should keep on checking - and explains some of my apparently bizarre comments from the past. Ethnicity isn't the only thing that can change.

I have had the same thing happen.
A match appears with a common ancestor - it made no sense to me, so I tried to do a bit of research on the apparent tree. My research went into my "Trees for DNA matches" which has little bits of trees, and then the common ancestor disappeared. This is a private but searchable tree and my hope is that anything there will be matched up with my main tree and provide a Common Ancestor. Next time I looked, the Common Ancestor had disappeared.

Ancestry at one time, kept suggesting a set of common ancestors on one line, but I researched and found their marriage date was way too late. It took a long time for that couple to disappear. I was sure I had a note about it on the matches page, but it seems to have disappeared - maybe the person deleted their DNA and their tree? Obviously we did share DNA, but not in the way suggested.