I have a number of women in my ancestry whose maiden names are unknown. They show up under their husband's name.

When I find the maiden name and update my tree to reflect this new name will it show up in the matches? Has anyone tried this?

Rosemary

Yes, when you pull up a match page, the surname matching is done right then. So, any changes you make will be reflected the next time someone pulls up your page.

I played with this a bit when I had a match who matched me two ways. I changed the name of the common ancestor in our Shared Ancestor Hint to "Zzzzzzz" to see if the other line would be displayed as the Shared Ancestor instead. All I had to do was hit "Reload" and the new hint was there, and the surname "Zzzzzzz" was now in my surname list, lol. :)

(Such a pity that Ancesty can't show more than one hint.)

Thanks. I was about to call and email that this was a bug if it didn't work that way.

Rosemary

Thanks for this helpful information, Shari! I have a 4th cousin match for whom Ancestry gave me a 6th-cousin Shared Ancestor Hint (a paternal line). This was correct, but Ancestry missed a 4th-cousin relationship on a maternal line.

"(Such a pity that Ancesty can't show more than one hint.)"

It can show more than one hint. This does not mean that any of them are actual matches. I did one test run that resulted in 3 suggested matches at once (all with different birth dates, death dates and middle names).

It can show more than one Shared Ancestor Hint? It's odd that I have never seen that as I have several DNA matches with whom I share more than one line.

I've never had more than one hint displayed, either. Frostfreedet, are multiple Shared Ancestor Hints something that you've seen recently? Maybe it's one of the new changes they're trying out with hints, but I just checked one of double-matches and I only see one hint. (And this is even one of the few matches where Ancestry is showing the leaf icon. Most of my SAHs still don't have one.)

Like I described above, my second hint only showed up when I altered the first one to a different surname ("Zzzzzz"), effectively removing it.

(I'm speaking exclusively of DNA hints, not the usual hints, in case there's been some misunderstanding.)

My mistake, Shari. I thought (since this is in the Member Trees board, not the DNA board) that the "matching" referred to by the original post related to the new duplicate-merge feature which searches for potential matched duplicates in a tree. The original post did not mention DNA.

My mistake as well! Or rather, we've both been framed by a forum admin. ;)

Looks like this post was moved in (well-intentioned, I'm sure) error from the DNA board to "Member Trees" at some point. I really wish admins would post a little note when they move a thread.

They also moved my post about leaves on DNA Shared Ancestor Hints over here.