Color Clustering: Top 25 Fourth Cousins

For another look at how Color Clustering works with 4th cousins, I created a Color Cluster chart then added the test taker’s top twenty-five 4th cousin matches. I was able to easily sort all but one of these 4th cousins into Color Clusters!

Original Color Cluster Chart (click here for Color Cluster Method)

This test taker’s AncestryDNA 2nd & 3rd cousins fell into 4 Color Clusters, labeled C1 through C4, with three “unclustered” cousins.

• • 2nd & 3rd cousins who are in more than one cluster are in red: Barbie, Ken, & Mark.
  • 2nd & 3rd cousins who did not have shared matches with other 2nd & 3rd cousins are in “unclustered” columns: Lena, Sue, and Mike. 

The test taker’s four sets of great grandparents were identified from her research as follows:

• • G1 – Bailey/Bowman (father’s father’s line)
  • G2 – Stark/Dunn (father’s mother’s line)
  • G3 – Hillard/Morris (mother’s father’s line)
  • G4 – Washington/Manning (mother’s mother’s line)

I looked at each cousin’s tree and did one of the following:

Adding 4th Cousins

Directly below this Color Cluster chart, I added the names of the first twenty-five 4th cousins. For each cousin, I looked at AncestryDNA’s “Shared Matches” and determined which 2nd/3rd cousins they were matching. I colored in the appropriate cell and labeled the cell with the number of shared centimorgans (cM).

Above is the final chart which includes all of the 2nd/3rd cousins (sharing <400 cM) and, below it, the first twenty-five 4th cousin matches. A few things to note about the 4th cousins:

• • Owen – At this point, Owen is still not in a cluster.
  • Mary & Bill – they both matched previously “unclustered” cousin Sue, so the three created a new cluster. We do not know what part of the family this cluster belongs to at this point.
  • Others – A few did not match any 2nd/3rd cousins, but when I opened their top match, they DID match a 2nd/3rd cousin, so I added them to that column.

NOTE: Trees were not used to match the 4th cousins to the appropriate Color Clusters. The sorts were based only on shared matches. This Color Cluster method is  a quick, visual way to see how your cousins are related.

If you give this method a try, please let me know what you think and how it works for you.

Happy Sorting!