So many AncestryDNA matches.

I had my DNA test done through Ancestry and managed to get my half-sister to also get her DNA test done. So now I have 277 pages of matches and she has 168 pages of matches. With 50 hits per page, that is a lot of matches.

So how do I go about comparing my matches with my sister’s matches? Reason I want to compare is the fact that we only share one parent, our Mother, this means these are her ancestors. Plus my mother was adopted by her step-father and we have no idea of who her biological father is and I was hoping to see some sort of common denominator.  

Anyway, the problem to compare our matches, since Ancestry doesn’t have a way to “Export” the list of matches; I had to manually key in the names of the matches into an Excel Spreadsheet. Next problem, how many names will I really going to compare? 168 pages is a lot of names. So I decided I would go until my matches switched to a confidence level of low. This meant 13 pages of names.  Therefore, I did the first 13 pages of matches for my sister too, even though her confidence level of low started around page 10. I wanted our list to be the same length.

Next, I did a search on the web to find a formula that would compare the list of matches and I was lucky to find the formula. So my sister’s matches were in column A and my matches were in column C. I keyed the formula of =IF(ISERROR(MATCH(A3,$C$3:$C$651,0)),"",A3) in Column B3. I copied the formula down until line 651.  

As you can see it worked great to identify the matches and I can see exactly which page the match was from too. Since I keyed in the matches, starting with page 1 and working to page 13; I went into each of her matches, and Starred the match and recorded a note.

However, I wanted to record the matches for me too. So I had to modify the formula for Column D and thus used =IF(ISERROR(MATCH(C3,$A$3:$A$651,0)),"",C3). I placed that formula in D3 and copied it down to line 651. This allowed me to identify the same matches, but now I know what page the results could be found for my results. I Starred my matches and recorded a similar note.

I am not sure if all this work is going to help me much, but it makes me feel as if I am trying to discover our common matches.

On my wish list from AncestryDNA is as follows: The minimum is to be able to export a list of our DNA matches such as all our matches, or only those we have starred, or just the new matches. My big dream wish is that there would be a way to compare my matches with any other match from my list. For example, I would like to know if I have any common matches with kathyval.  By comparing our common matches, I might be able to figure out what branch we have in common by checking out all our common matches.