Today came the excitement that we can see who our Relatives at Rootstech are. I now have 71. Not unexpectedly, 65% are living in the US, 16% in Canada, 10% in Australia and 9% in the UK.
The closest relation, who remained so about as long as my alleged relationship to Prince William lasted (see yesterday’s blog), was a third cousin. Some more tree surgery and now she is correctly labelled as a 5th cousin once removed. I have four of these and these are the closest Relatives at Rootstech. This is about par for the course given my dearth of cousins. Amongst the Relatives at Rootstech, I have six sixth cousins, fifteen sixth cousins once removed and seven sixth cousins twice removed. Then follow various seventh and eight cousins. The most remote relatives identified are nine nineth cousins, five of whom descend from the same couple.
What was most interesting, was which branches of my family were and were not, represented. I should say that, apart from one brick wall great great grandparent, my tree is fairly evenly populated, with many lines back to 4x or 5x great grandparents and beyond. I looked at my Rootstech relatives and which of my eight great grandparents they linked to. As expected, no one was connected to the brick wall ancestor. I have now added the people who I believe to be his parents and the ancestry beyond that, to see if that makes any difference. Much more surprisingly, two other great grandparents were not represented at all, although I suppose one was called Smith and others may not have had much success tracing them. Given the high levels of emigration from Devon and Cornwall, I was expecting many of my relatives to link to that quarter of my ancestry. What I wasn’t prepared for was quite how overwhelmingly this was the case. 72% of my Relatives at Rootstech come from this 25% of my ancestry. An overwhelming 38% of my Relatives at Rootstech come from just one line, although I must say that I believe the earliest generations of this tree to be speculative. I suspect that US descendants of this line became adherents of the LDS church, which might account for the high number of matches.
I began, as you do, by madly and randomly clicking on the various listed relatives. The I went through them methodically, making a note of all the names, so, if the number goes up, I can tell who is new. I have also listed the relationship, the common ancestors and where the relative lives. I then went through each one, to see if they featured on my list of DNA matches. Of course, I only picked this up if the user name was similar or recognisable. I thought I might identify the connection for some of those DNA matches with no Ancestry trees, or private trees. I was surprised and disappointed find just one Relative at Rootstech who was also a DNA match, and I had already identified her place on my tree.
If you want to join in the fun, there are three stages to the process. You need to make sure you have signed up for RootsTechConnect using the same email address that you use to log in to Family Search. You have to have some kind of tree at Family Search and you have to have opted in to Relatives at Rootstech. I would love to find out that I am related to someone I know.
The History Interpreter - Janet Few 
Hello Janet, thanks for the tips. I have nearly 2000 ‘relatives’ only one at 4th cousin level and nearly all at 7th or higher level and in the USA. I decided to look at other countries first and all of the people are on my mother’s side of the family, about which I already know quite a lot. I will keep trawling through and hope to find someone on my father’s side of the family…. I had already found lots of Ancestry DNA links to two particular lines and they predominate in these RootsTech connections. I do find Family Search very laborious when it comes to ‘merging’. It’s not a good experience.
Perhaps I’ll manage to actually hear some of the talks!
Best wishes, Vanessa
I’m glad you enjoyed the talk this morning. It was good to have a few new people like yourself, mainly people with a Shilbottle connection. We are very new at zoom talks, that was our second. Next one should be interesting on place names in first edition of Nthbld OS maps, a project I helped with in a minor way. Thank you for your interest in our group. I can put you on the mailing list . At the moment we are not collecting any subs as we don’t feel we can offer so much under COVID restrictions. We have about 20 paying members and several people who come occasionally to our talks in normal times so the latter are on a mailing list for our newsletter which you will also receive.
You have done me a good turn by mentioning RootsTech and the facility on Family Search to link up with relatives. It sounds amazing. I had already registered for RootsTech but didn’t know about the opportunity for finding relatives so I’m going to quickly put my tree on and see what happens. Thank you!
Valerie Glass