Looking For My Roots

I did the math. Honestly, I wish I hadn’t.

My AncestryDNA account lists 14,349 pages of matches, with 20 people per page. Even rounding down to 14,348 pages, that’s 286,960 DNA matches.

That’s 286,960 people who share some of my DNA and are probably related to me in some way. But my family’s hometown, Rincón, Puerto Rico, only has about 15,477 residents. Hmm?

I stared at that number for a while, then closed the browser tab.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. You open your match list hoping to discover your great-grandmother’s family, but instead it looks like a whole city’s worth of people.

Where do you even begin? Should you start? Would it be possible to finish?

You can do it, but only if you change how you think about the process.

You’re not just managing a list—you’re working with a database. As a former data scientist and database developer/architect in my “working life,” I can tell you that the first rule is simple: don’t try to look at everything at once.

The Reality of My Match List

Of those 286,960 matches, only about 10 were close matches with attached family trees. That’s not counting the 50 relatives I already know—siblings, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins.

I’m not complaining about other people’s trees—it’s just how big DNA databases work. Many people tested for health reasons, got a kit as a gift, or took the test years ago and never came back. Their profiles and DNA are there, but there’s no tree, surname, or location, so connecting them to your family takes a lot of detective work.

That detective work is worth it for the right matches, but you can’t do it for 286,960 people. You need to decide who deserves your time, which means having a filtering strategy before you even start.

The Principle: Do Not Start at the Beginning

When you open your AncestryDNA match list, it’s natural to want to scroll from the top and see what you find.

But if you do that, you’ll be exhausted within a week, or in my case, a few hours.

Instead, begin with a short list of priorities:

1. Known close relatives
2. Unknown close matches
3. Matches with useful trees
4. Shared-match clusters
5. Matches tied to a specific research question you are already working on

Everything else can wait, but not forever. Just until one of those five categories gives you a reason to look further.

AncestryDNA offers tools to help: filters for relationship range, tree type, shared DNA, common ancestors, and SideView parent-side categories. You don’t have to review every match to use these tools well. Use them to narrow your working list to a manageable size.

After applying this approach, my working list is about 100 matches—not 286,960.

That’s manageable. It’s based on evidence, and it’s a number where real genealogical work is possible.

Step 1: Create a “Known Relatives” Framework

Before you check any unknown matches, label the people you already know. It is the step most people skip, and it is the most important one. Your known relatives are not research targets. They are anchors. They are the fixed points that allow you to sort everyone else.

Here is the framework I created for my own account:

DNA Group	What it Includes
Known: Immediate	Parents, siblings, children, nieces and nephews
Known: Maternal	My mother’s siblings and their descendants
Known: Paternal	My father’s siblings and their descendants
Known: Vargas line	Documented relatives from the Vargas family
Known: Valentin line	Documented relatives from those lines
Research Priority	Close matches I cannot yet place
Endogamy caution	Matches appearing on multiple family lines

AncestryDNA lets you assign color-coded groups and add notes to your matches. Use both features.

Labeling a match as “Known: Paternal” and adding a note like “Dad’s aunts, uncles, cousins” takes just two minutes and can save you hours of confusion later.

The goal for your first pass through your matches is simple: label everyone you recognize. Don’t research them or build their tree—just label and move on.

Step 2: Do Not Delete or Ignore Siblings and Known Cousins

When I first tried to organize my matches, I wanted to filter out the people I already knew. I know my siblings and first cousins—so why keep looking at them?

Because they aren’t clutter—they’re your sorting system.

Here is what known relatives are actually for:

Known Match	How to Use It
Sibling	Confirms your shared family pool; use as a check on other close matches
First cousin	Excellent anchor for one grandparent line
Second cousin	Excellent anchor for one great-grandparent pair
Third cousin	Useful for one second-great-grandparent line
Known cousin from Rincon	Helps isolate Rincon-specific clusters
Known cousin from the NYC diaspora	Helps separate migration-era lines from island lines

If a match you cannot identify shares DNA with your known first cousin on your father’s side, that unknown match is very likely on your father’s side too. If they do not appear in your first cousin’s shared matches, they are probably on your mother’s side.

Your known relatives help you interpret every unknown match. Label them, keep them, and use them.

The note I add to every known relative is the same:

“KNOWN. Do not research. Use as anchor for [line].”

Step 3 (in Progress): Reaching Out

Once you’ve labeled your known relatives, you can look at the rest with a fresh perspective.

– Who are these people?
– What do their trees show?
– Where did their families come from?

Finally, I decided to reach out to some of them. This part of the process surprised me. I thought it would feel like paperwork, but it doesn’t at all.

Every message I send goes to a real person. Some share my great-grandparents; others might connect through a distant ancestor I haven’t documented yet or through a branch I haven’t traced. Some have trees with familiar surnames, while others have names I don’t recognize, which can be an intriguing clue.

I write my messages in both English and Spanish. My family is Puerto Rican, and many of my matches are as well. If I wrote only in English, I’d miss out on connecting with many people who might respond.

Each message I send is prompted by something specific, a surname in their tree that matches my family, a connection to a town I’m researching, or a possible shared ancestor I’m trying to document. I don’t send the same message to everyone. I introduce myself, explain what we have in common, and share what I hope to learn.

Then I wait.

I’ve learned that waiting is actually part of the process. Most people don’t log into AncestryDNA often. Some reply in a day, some in six months, and some never respond. Waiting isn’t failure—it’s just how genealogy research by correspondence works, as it always has.

What Comes Next

This is just the start of the work.

Labeling known relatives and reaching out to close matches are just the foundation. These steps don’t give you all the answers, but they create a map by showing who connects to whom, which side of the family a match is on, and where to focus your research time.

The next steps in this series will cover:

• Building your first working set of 100 to 300 priority matches
• Using a four-level priority system to keep from drowning
• Clustering your matches by shared family network
• Working on a specific research question through DNA evidence
• Understanding what Puerto Rican endogamy does to your cM totals and why your matches look closer than they are

Each of these topics will get its own post. We’ll proceed gradually.

If you’re just starting out and want a structured reference to go with this series, working through my matches made me think about what a first-time researcher really needs. That led me to create a step-by-step guide on the PuertoRicanGenealogy.org website: I Have My AncestryDNA Results. Now What?

The guide covers basics such as reading centimorgan values, using Shared Matches, attaching a tree, and the first steps in clustering. Both the blog series and the guide come from the same experience and are designed to work together.

Where are you in your DNA match list? How many matches do you have?
Please leave a comment below to let me know where you’re stuck. The number doesn’t have to feel overwhelming forever.

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