RLP 395: How to Use Ancestry DNA Custom Clusters in Your Research

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 395: How to Use Ancestry DNA Custom Clusters in Your Research.

Nicole (43s):
Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. This episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Welcome to Research Like a Pro. Hello to everyone and hi Mom.

Diana (48s):
Hi Nicole. How’s it going today?

Nicole (51s):
It’s going great. I’m working on RootsTech stuff and it’s funny because a lot of the prep work that we do for RootsTech happens in January and things are due, so hopefully by the end of February everything will be done

Diana (1m 7s):
Right. I have several syllabi I need to get taken care of and slides to create. You know, we send in these proposals months ahead and they choose some of them and then we actually have to put together the presentation, go figure.

Nicole (1m 21s):
Right? Yes. And the ones I thought I was gonna teach, I ended up doing something totally different after talking with the speaker coordinator and so I’m teaching a couple AI classes now and I’m excited about that. One is about transcribing documents with AI, which I talked about last year and so I’m doing that again except for like an update from what it was last year. So it’s kind of like here’s the same information but updated for this year.

Diana (1m 50s):
That’s really good because AI does change like all the time.

Nicole (1m 54s):
Yeah, it’s insane. Trying to keep up with all the, the different changes and things and, but it is really good that I am trying to keep up on those changes ’cause it forces me to keep practicing with AI and seeing what it can do and and kind of figuring out like, okay, here’s a task that I know I want to use AI for. Here’s a task that I know I need to do myself. And so it keeps me thinking about that.

Diana (2m 18s):
Absolutely. I love that idea. Well let’s do some announcements. We are excited about our new Research Like a Pro Institute and our first institute course is going to be held this spring and the title is Merging and Separating Identities. Here’s a little blurb to help you know if you would like to join us: Have you ever hit a brick wall because you can’t figure out which John Smith is your John Smith? You’re not alone. Genealogists everywhere struggle with the same frustrating problem, multiple people with the same name in the same place and time period. That’s exactly why Jan Joyce created Merging and Separating Identities, a multi-week intensive course that teaches you proven strategies to solve your most complex identity puzzles.

Diana (3m 7s):
Whether you’re dealing with many Henry DeWitts in one Ohio County or tracking someone who changed their name across multiple states, this course gives you the tools to crack the case. You’ll learn to build high identity dossiers, master correlation techniques, and use both high tech and offline methods to distinguish between candidates, work with real case studies, practice with a common data set, and get hands-on guidance from Jan and this team of expert instructors, Kristen Britek, Nicole Dyer, Patty Hobbs, Lynn Nelson, and Kim Richardson. Stop spinning your wheels! Limited spots are available, visit the FamilyLocket website and click on shop then institute courses to learn more and register for this dynamic Merging and Separating Identities course and finally break through those identity roadblocks.

Diana (3m 53s):
The course will be held weekly on Thursdays from April 30th to June 11th at 9:00 AM to 2:30 PM Mountain time. Well we are in full swing for our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series for 2026 and coming up on February 17th, which is a Tuesday at 11:00 AM Mountain Time, we have Sunni Mohammadbhoy teaching us From Georgia to Florida: Reconstructing the Family of Seth Howard Through DNA and Historical Evidence.

Diana (4m 38s):
Seth Howard was born about 1804 in Georgia and migrated to the Territory of Florida in 1816. He is a registered “Florida Pioneer” with the Florida Genealogical Society. He is well researched by professional Genealogists and his numerous ascendants, yet the identity of his parents has never been discovered. Thorough analysis of the documentary evidence gathered from his adult life seemed to yield no clues to his parentage.

Diana (5m 33s):
This case study uses atDNA cluster analysis along with pedigree triangulation as a lead toward possibly identifying his parents. Additional correlation of documentary evidence, geographical and historical context, and onomastic clues provides a compelling circumstantial case to support the report’s conclusion. Topics are: Georgia, Florida, DNA Gedcom, Clustering, BanyanDNA, Pedigree Collapse, Pedigree Triangulation, Georgia Land Lotteries, the Patriot War, Frontier Migration, Tax Records, Court Records, 19th-Century Research, Onomastic Clues, FAN Club, Correlation of Documentary Evidence, Segment Triangulation, Y-DNA, Deeds, Probate Documents Wow, there’s a little bit of everything in there. So this is going to be such a great case study, a great webinar. Our next study group, Research Like a Pro with DNA, is beginning in two days and registration is now closed. So if you wanted to join us, keep it in mind for next year. And keep in mind the fall study group. Registration will open for that, that in the summer and that one will be without DNA, just purely documentary work, and it’s a great foundation for a DNA project or just figuring out your family tree. As we’ve talked about, we’re excited about the RootsTech Conference, which is coming up March 5th through 7th and there will be an online version for anyone who doesn’t wanna travel to Salt Lake City, but we hope you’ll be there in person so we can meet you.

Diana (6m 23s):
We love being in person. There’s such a fun energy, fun vibe at RootsTech that if you’ve never been, you just gotta try it. Well today we are talking about an addition to Ancestry’s Pro Tools that has been hinted at and is finally here, at least it is for me. And I know sometimes they roll out things in different times, so I dunno if everybody will have this, but if you pay for Pro Tools, you might have the custom clustering feature and the original clustering tool that Ancestry came out with first gave us predetermined centimorgan ranges and we didn’t have much flexibility.

Diana (7m 4s):
But now custom clusters lets us strategically target a specific ancestral line. We can choose our own matches and parameters. So when you start up the clustering, it tells you this: we start by looking at matches on each side of your family who share 65 centimorgans to 1300 centimorgans with you. Next we find matches in these groups who share at least 20 centimorgans with each other. This creates clusters of matches who likely share a common ancestor. You can add clusters to match groups you’ve created or make new groups. You can also create custom clusters with specific matches and centimorgan ranges from 20 to 1300.

Diana (7m 49s):
So we are going to talk about how to create and use these custom clusters effectively and we’ll show with a real example from my Cline family line. So if you’ve been kind of wondering if this is something you want to try, then you can certainly give it a shot. I did do a video which is on YouTube and it’s titled How to Use Ancestry DNA Custom Clusters in Your Research, because I know sometimes when you’re listening you just want to see the pictures and follow along. So you can go to the video and it will lead you through things like where to find the custom clustering feature on Ancestry and how to select target matches and sidekick matches strategically, setting the appropriate centimorgans and real world applications, So breaking down that large Cline family cluster into meaningful sub clusters, and then some tips for tracking your custom cluster experiments in Airtable.

Diana (8m 50s):
So all of those things you can really get some good details on from the video.

Nicole (8m 56s):
All right, let’s talk about why you might want to use the custom clusters at Ancestry. There are several good benefits that come from using this. One is that you can hone in on specific ancestral lines. So when you’re working with a focused research objective as we do in Research Like a Pro or with a client project, custom clusters help you narrow down thousands of matches to just those relevant to your current question. You can quickly identify groups descending from common ancestors and that’s kind of the beauty of clustering. It can help you really see various groups that are related to each other. They kind of get pulled together in these colored groupings. And while shared matches and other tools are valuable, custom clusters can really speed up the process of finding the right group of people to investigate.

Nicole (9m 41s):
And of course you can do the Leeds Method or you can, you know, work on just going through manually all the matches and and looking if they’re maternal or paternal and then continuing to divide into like the four grandparent groups and all that. This really helps you do it faster. And so along that same line, another benefit is that you can work more efficiently for finding information about more distant generations. So when you’re researching third, fourth, or fifth great grandparents where the DNA segments are small, custom clusters can help you identify patterns that might otherwise be harder to find with the regular clusters. So this can be really helpful.

Diana (10m 18s):
Well, before you start creating custom clusters, there are some good things to know, and this is straight from Ancestry documentation: your clusters will expire after 30 days unless you add them to a group. When it says group, that just means one of the colored, we used to call ’em the colored dots, now they’re colored squares. So a group that you name and you can have 25 clusters in your history at a time. Clusters may change or disappear if matches opt out or delete their tests. And so you might want to take screenshots of important clusters for your records. The temporary nature of these clusters means you need to be intentional about saving the ones that matter to your research.

Diana (11m 3s):
And I think those are such good tips. Sometimes we think that something will be around forever and we’ve seen this in Thrulines, an entire Thruline could disappear if someone deletes their test or changes their tree or changes something else in their DNA. And so with something like this, if you’ve got a really great cluster and you are getting some good clues from that, make sure you screenshot that, add it to a group, really be intentional about saving the clues that you’re getting from that custom cluster.

Nicole (11m 38s):
Interestingly, I was just looking at one of my clusters, it wasn’t a custom one but it was a standard cluster and it did expire, but it did still list it on my clusters page and it just said expired and then it had a button next to it that said refresh. So that I think if you wanted to use that one again, you could click the refresh button and you could still see it. So that was interesting. I wasn’t sure what it would look like when things expired.

Diana (12m 2s):
Ooh, that’s very good to know.

Nicole (12m 4s):
But it, it probably won’t stay there forever. So it is probably good to click refresh if you’re still using it. And then like, like it said to put everyone into a group.

Diana (12m 11s):
And I think it also would be helpful to maybe, you know, maybe put this in a group, screenshot the cluster and put it in perhaps a Word document and then put some notes below it with your thoughts and what you want to do with that. Because often we’re clicking around, we’re trying these things and we get a great idea, but then we come back to ’em, we can’t quite remember what was going on. Why do we care about this cluster? So I think we need to have some good notes. We could even put it into your Airtable base as an attachment and have some notes in that. So just wanna document our our work,

Nicole (12m 45s):
Right. Okay, well let’s talk about the guidance that Ancestry gives for creating your own custom cluster. They give some starting recommendations based on the generational distance that you’re wanting to research or focus on. So if you’re not really sure what centimorgan range to put in, you might think about it this way, if you are focusing on looking for a great-grandparent using second cousin relationships, then you’ll want to put in a range of 90 to 340 centimorgans. Now going back to another generation further back second great-grandparents where you’re looking at third cousin matches, you’ll want a range of about 40 to 120 centimorgans.

Nicole (13m 29s):
And of course some third cousins will share less than 40. So you could adjust that. And then third great-grandparent level with fourth cousins, you can adjust it down to 20 to 60 centimorgan range. And it’s good to think about limiting this. I mean it’s tempting to just wanna put in like 20 centimorgans up to 1300, like the full range. But if you do that you will have too many matches. So it really is important to narrow it down because the clusters system can’t include all of your thousands of matches. So it needs some parameters and you can play with it and try different things and see what happens.

Nicole (14m 10s):
But these are some good starting ideas. So once you’ve kind of figured out what level you’re working on, you know, second great-grandparent, third great-grandparent and a centimorgan range, then you will choose a target DNA match. So this is really interesting because with the regular clusters, Ancestry just does it for you. You don’t have to think about anything really, but for a custom cluster it wants you to choose a target DNA match and Ancestry recommends a second or third cousin, but you can choose any match. And if you use a second or third cousin, then you wanna focus on somebody who is like a descendant of your research subject that you know of.

Nicole (14m 50s):
And so that will help narrow down the matches to be very focused in on that line. After you choose your target match, then you can select four additional matches who also share DNA with your target match. These are called sidekick matches and I love that because sidekick is such a fun word that we don’t ever hear in DNA work. So we’ve gotta choose our sidekick matches. And these aren’t just any matches, these are shared matches with the target match, so they’re also gonna be on that same side of the family. So it’s not like you’re choosing, you know, one match on your mom’s side and another match on your dad’s side. No, you’re choosing all matches that are shared matches with each other.

Nicole (15m 31s):
So it really focuses in on that right line of the family. You know, if you’ve figured things out correctly, at least if you’ve identified which line this is for. And so you’ve got your target match up to four sidekick matches, although I just created a custom cluster that only had one sidekick match. And then after you choose your four sidekick matches up to four, then you can set your centimorgan range for the cluster. So let’s say we were doing third great-grandparents and we use Ancestry’s recommendation of 20 to 60 centimorgans, then you can generate the cluster and review the results.

Diana (16m 6s):
Okay, So it is exciting, it’s fun to look at this. I just looked at my Ancestry and I had to redo my cluster that we’re going to talk about, but it came right back So it refreshed it. I’m glad it refreshed it. So let’s do a little example here. So I’ve talked a lot about John C Cline and working on research on his line. So for this, my objective was to test whether John C Cline, who was born about 1785 in either Pennsylvania or Virginia, was the biological father of Clemsy Cline Weatherford. And she was born about 1820 in Alabama. And I’d already done a lot of work creating a DNA network graph through Genetic Affairs and I had identified several hypothesized siblings of Clemsy who might also be children of John C Cline.

Diana (16m 54s):
And I decided to try a custom cluster. So I selected a target match who descended from Mahala Cline Shockley, and this was a match who I had hypothesized came from this, this sister Mahala. And then I added four other matches who were descendants of Clemsy and who also matched the target. And then I set a range of 20 to 50 centimorgans. I wanted it to be relatively low to avoid too many matches and it was exciting. It separated into several distinct sub clusters and I found a clear group of matches that all descended through William Abner Cline, who was another hypothesized half sibling of Clemsy and an intriguing cluster where none of the matches had trees that agreed on their origins.

Diana (17m 45s):
And so this would give me a great opportunity to do a lot of tree building and investigation into these matches who have to come from somewhere, somewhere their trees need to converge. And it did gimme some additional evidence to support my hypothesis about John C Cline’s children. And I loved the ease of just being able to use the tools right within Ancestry and all these matches When you click on them, you get to go directly to their page. You can see right away if you have a common ancestor with them, if they have a tree. And So it just makes it really easy to work within your matches.

Diana (18m 29s):
So I appreciate that. Thank you Ancestry for helping us. Now let’s have a word from our sponsor.

Diana (19m 28s):
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Nicole (19m 30s):
Okay, now I’m gonna just give a couple practical tips for success with the custom clusters. One of them is to save your clusters strategically. So if you make a clustering and you find something interesting, make sure you add that important cluster to a group with a meaningful name like “Cline sub cluster possible sibling” so that you can track your different hypotheses. And another is to try different target matches. The DNA inheritance that we receive is random because of recombination and so if you choose the same target match every time, then you’re limiting yourself. So if you know there’s like a 100 descendants of that, that research subject you’re working on, maybe 10, 15, a hundred, whatever it is, you can choose different ones.

Nicole (20m 18s):
And I like to start with the ones who share more DNA with my test taker because they have a higher ability to pull in more shared matches. You know, if there’s someone sharing 150 centimorgans versus someone who descends from the same research subject but only shares 20 centimorgans, then the one that shares a lot more is gonna potentially have more capability of having shared matches with the more distant ancestors. So we just want to try different target matches and you could try focusing in on the ones that share the most. You can try choosing ones that share a medium amount, but all of this experimenting with various combinations can really help you find things you might miss.

Nicole (21m 4s):
And so especially when the clustering is kind of newer at Ancestry, it’s good to just try different things and then you’ll eventually probably figure out what works best for you. Then while you’re doing these experiments, track your experiments with multiple target matches, different sidekick combinations and varying centimorgan ranges to test. You’ll want a systematic way to document what you’ve tried. So we recommend using your Airtable research log to record all your custom clusters and the target match you used, the four sidekick matches you added, or 1, 2, 3 or four sidekick matches the centimorgan range that you set and the results that you found and any clues that you noticed.

Nicole (21m 44s):
And then even if you added people to groups, you know, to the the colored groups in Ancestry, this documentation will be so invaluable when you’re working on a complex project that goes on over time. So also the last tip I guess is to be patient with a learning curve because sometimes you might have a custom cluster with some random matches that just ends up becoming a huge blob with no useful separation. So using thoughtfully selected target matches and sidekick matches really does make a difference.

Diana (22m 14s):
Well let’s think about what might be coming. Custom clusters are really exciting and right now we can get down to the 20 centimorgan range, but maybe Ancestry will someday let us go even below that and extend to smaller matches segments which could open up even more research possibilities for our distant ancestors. So as you said, Nicole, I think important to this is just experimenting, you know, pick a project, pick an ancestor where you know your matches and you can see how it works and you can understand what’s going on. I think it’s always easier if you know something than just going way into the beyond where you have no idea who any of these matches are, you don’t know how they connect.

Diana (23m 0s):
So you might wanna start with a research objective where you’ve already done some preliminary work identifying these potential matches and then you could just try different combinations of your target and your sidekick matches to see what patterns emerge. One thing that I was reminded of and just trying this as we’re recording here, is when you get your cluster on Ancestry, you can click on any of the boxes or just hover over any of the boxes in the cluster and it shows you how much DNA that people share. So you know, you can see John and Joyce share 35 centimorgans and you know, it’s just really neat because you get the information by just hovering right over the box and you start getting some ideas about what’s going on.

Diana (23m 49s):
So it makes it really easy and you’ve just gotta try it to, to enjoy it. And Pro Tools does have a cost involved. So you know, it might be something you try out for a month or two, do a lot of DNA work and then cancel it until you’re ready to go back to it. But if you are really serious about trying to determine an ancestor far back with DNA, or even if it’s like not that far back, just an unknown ancestor, then we would really recommend that you try the custom clusters, do the Pro Tools, ’cause it really makes a difference.

Nicole (24m 26s):
Absolutely. And you know, using the, the tools that the company gives you can be just a really fantastic way to stay right within the testing company’s website and find evidence and connections that you might not have seen normally. And in the past we’ve relied a lot on third party tools to do some of the clustering for us. So this is just a huge step forward in being able to stay right in the testing company and use their own in-house clustering tools without having to do the extra steps of trying to, you know, type out the matches into a spreadsheet for the Leeds Method or try to extract the data some other way. So I just, I’m really hopeful for the future with this that it will grow even more useful as it gets more flexible and it, the custom clusters is really awesome.

Nicole (25m 13s):
It’s not as flexible as it could be, so maybe eventually it will get more flexible with like, you know, different centimorgan ranges that go lower. But it’s pretty good. I mean, it’s pretty good right now, so it’s exciting. And we’d love to hear how custom clusters have helped you, strategies that you’re using. Please send us an email or submit a comment to the show notes page to let us know what’s working for you and we’d love hearing how everyone’s using these new tools. All right, thanks everyone for listening. Have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye

Diana (25m 45s):
Bye-Bye.

Nicole (26m 25s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.