When you are working through your AncestryDNA match list, the matches you have already connected to a person in your tree are no longer the ones you need to research. They still take up half the page though, forcing you to scroll past matches you have already solved to find the ones you have not.
When a DNA match has a public tree, the easiest way to find a surname or place you recognize is to open the List of all people view. Ancestry only gives you a Tree link though, so you always land in the graphical tree first and then click through to the list view.
The Card view of your ThruLines list of all ancestors shows no DNA match numbers at all, so there is no way to tell which ancestors have matches descending from them without opening each one in turn. To find the ancestors with the most matches, or to spot the lines with none, means working through the whole grid one card at a time.
On Ancestry’s Clusters page, the column headers are the names of your DNA matches written at an angle, and finding the intersection of two particular matches in a large grid means running your finger from the row on the left to the column at the top without losing your place.
When you are comparing trees between a DNA match and yourself on Ancestry’s Compare Trees page, the surnames you share and the surnames they have are right there on screen, but there is no way to copy them to the clipboard or hand them off to another tool.
The Surname Comparison Tool works best when you can feed it an entire group of related matches at once, but adding them one at a time from each Compare Trees page is slow. If you have a strong DNA match with fifty shared matches, that is fifty round trips to compare every tree in the group.
