Family Photo Friday ~ Happy 35th Birthday, Kenny!

Dear Kenny,

Tomorrow is your birthday. God gave me a precious gift when he gave me you. I have been thinking of you all week and as I write this, tears are falling down my cheeks. I miss you terribly, some days are better than others. On days like today I wonder what your life would be like if you had not been taken away from us so soon in life. Would you be married? Would Easton have cousins to play with? Oh how you would love your nephew! He is another precious gift too! He is super goofy and he calls me Dede.

Happy Birthday my son!

Love,

Momma

New DNA Notification Icon on Ancestry ~ Now You See It ~ Now You Don't

Today, when I signed in to Ancestry.com I opened my usual two windows on my desktop computer to begin working on my current tree. I use one window to work in and another to keep the pedigree view of the family that I work on for the day so that I can keep things in perspective and quickly check dates, ancestors and descendants. I usually leave the window with the pedigree alone until I am through for the day. 

After doing a few things here at home I sat down at my computer to begin where I left off before lunch. That is when I noticed a new icon in the top right hand corner of my Ancestry toolbar. I went to look at the window with pedigree because I had not refreshed it in since I had opened it this morning which meant it still had the old tool bar icons. The photograph below shows only the "leaf" for hints and the message icon. See the photo below.

 I went back and forth between the two pages. The DNA icon was not the only thing I noticed (the icon actually had the number of matches) but unfortunately I didn't think to snap a picture with my cell phone at that particular moment. Below is the the "new toolbar" with the DNA icon.

Yay!!! Now that there is an icon on the Ancestry toolbar it will be easier to see new matches right? Not yet! I clicked on the icon and I had about 20 matches I could look at and I quickly scanned them, realizing that of the 20 matches I could see only 4 of them which were direct matches for me. Now wait a minute, should I really be seeing these matches? I know who the matches belong to and we are related on my birth father's side of the tree. As a matter of fact, without this person's help I would still be wondering about the paternal half of my biological tree. However, the 4 matches belonging to me on the list are for my maternal side of the tree. 

I called Ancestry and yes, the icon is a new feature being rolled out. When I was talking with the Ancestry representative my question to him was, "Am I seeing these results because I have shared my DNA results with the administrator of another test/tree?" Yes we share DNA but should I really be seeing all of her matches? The representative I talked to didn't really have an answer. While he put me on hold and attempted to find answer for me, the blurb he was given to pass on was in short, yes.

Curious to see if possibly these are new matches to me, as in a branch of my birth family I had not discovered, I opened a new window so that I could click on this new icon for DNA matches I was seeing and to try the first name that was on the list. When the toolbar was visible, the icon was no longer available. I signed out of Ancestry, signed back in and still I have no icon. Just think, if I hadn't snapped some quick pictures I would be really wondering if I had seen this icon!  Obviously there is still some tweaking to do and I will wait until Ancestry is ready to roll out this feature in more detail and see what happens.