As I noted in my last post (Drinking Through A Fire Hose), I have over 10,000 DNA Matches with pretty solid genealogy paths back to our Common Ancestors. I’m about 1/3 of the way through entering and Tagging these Matches and their paths back to our CAs in my main Tree at Ancestor.

Let’s look at an example. My Ancestor [A0856] John HIGGINBOTHAM b 1695; married 1713 in Amherst Co, VA to Frances RILEY. I have identified 827 DNA Match/cousins who descend from them.

Note 1: most of my Matches do not have a Tree back to John – I and ThruLines determined most of the paths.

Note 2: search Public Member Trees for John [drumroll….]: 10,323 Trees! WOW! Take a guess at how many Ancestry members actually descend from John and Francis, but don’t have Trees that reach 9 generations back…  – 100 thousand? A million?

Note 3: take a guess at how many DNA test takers there are in addition to the 827 folks I have already documented back to John and Francis. I’m sure it’s a LOT!!

Suppose we were all working within one Tree…

Over the years there have been several attempts to establish one family tree: OneWorldTree (Ancestry); World Family Tree (Geni); World Connect (RootsTech); WikiTree; FamilySearch Family Tree. IMO, there are a lot of issues within these attempts, as individuals interpret records differently, or worse, enter names and relationships without any documentation, etc, etc. Many NPEs are never discovered…

Concept: suppose we started Tagging ourselves, our DNA Matches, the DNA Connections, and the DNA Common Ancestors in WikiTree or FamilySearch.

As I wrote about in “Advanced Genetic Genealogy, Techniques and Case Studies”, I had identified three separate Triangulated Groups from John HIGGINBOTHAM and Frances RILEY [my 7XG grandparents – Ahnentafel 856].  In other words there were three finite segments in my maternal DNA that were in each of my Ancestors going back to John or Frances; and a shared/overlapping  DNA segment [part of my segment] in each of my 827 Matches, and in their Ancestors in a path of descendants from John or Frances down to and including each Match. [Remember each Match overlapped some of my DNA segment in the full Triangulated Group.]

Note that, on average, each of my Matches probably also had about 3 segments that went back to John and Frances. And I am not the center of the universe – all the other DNA test takers have their own, independent, experience. Certainly, there were many other descendants of John and Frances who had different DNA segments.

So what benefits would accrue to this concept…

1. Our accumulated Tags would provide a consensus that the paths we shared back to an Ancestor, passed through true genetic genealogy paths. This would be evidence that was independent of the genealogy analysis.

2. Perhaps a TG segment was actually from a different Ancestor. In the grand scheme of DNA, there would be certain distinct DNA segments that would be passed down from each Ancestor to various living test takers. It seems to me that, in general, these would wind up in multiple descendants. Note: we know that a given DNA segment could possibly be from a range of Ancestors, but when a number of DNA test takers all have the same [overlapping] DNA segment, it must surely be from one Common Ancestor.

3. So, this concept would help weed out which DNA segments came from which Ancestors.

4. Also, we’d start to accumulate specific DNA segments that came from specific Ancestors. We’d have the accumulated data to “paint” some of the Ancestor’s DNA.

I’m looking for feedback on this post. Pros and cons… Additional ideas… Is this already being tried? Shouldn’t we Segmentologists be working on a way to share and combine our DNA data to benefit each other? I’m looking for better language to articulate the possibilities and/or drawbacks of this concept.

[22DL] Segment-ology: A Concept Project for Segmentologists; by Jim Bartlett 20260622