Peter, I too have found the associated trees at Ancestry easier to work with than FTDNA's trees (can often at least assign a match to a grandparent's line), and have not yet used the second-party tools for Ancestry, but regarding DNA Circles, I would suggest you read Roberta Estes's blog posts about them at http://dna-explained.com/. Quite a few things can affect whether a DNA Circle is created, including minor spelling differences, besides which that DNA Circles sometimes involve the wrong "ancestor". Karla On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 6:38 AM, Peter J Richardson via < genealogy-dna@rootsweb.com> wrote: > > The problem I'm finding though is that the submitted trees on FTDNA are not > easy to follow and I suspect that GEDMatch is for the dedicated DNA > researcher, so I am struggling to get enough data to identify the many > unidentified matches that I have. I thought that the recent testing > initiative on Ancestry would make DNA testing more mainstream and with the > more extensive trees on there I would find more data to work with, so I did > a test on there. I have indeed found more matches including one which the > ancestors in common can be found and would like to be able to use this > match > to make more sense of my FTDNA & Gedmatch matches. > > I am not actually familiar with the tools Mike mentions (and wonder whether > they might give me the information I am after?). I also notice that > Ancestry > seems to have "DNA circles" for Charles Aldous, and also for his parents > but > does not seem to have any "DNA circles" for the ancestors I have in common > with the new match I have found and I wonder why not. > > Regards > Peter >