Another little success

So I just wanted to share my latest little success with Wiki Tree and Ancestry DNA.

I had been looking at some Ancestry matches again, to see if I could figure out how we were related.

I tried a new trick where I opened an unknown match and then clicked on the "SHARED MATCHES".

Now for Ancestry, I am pretty sure that shared matches to them means people that not only are common between the two, but actually share the same portion of DNA... meaning you have inherited a specific chain of DNA that should be able to be traced back to an individual or marriage.  (This gets rid of false matches --you might share a match with someone but are not related. For example,  my first paternal cousin and my first maternal cousin both share me as a match, but are not related to one another.)

Now I took those matches and opened each in a new browser window and then arranged all of these windows on my desktop so I could easily compare all of their listed SURNAMES.

I found one SURNAME that stood out, and digging deeper, I found a specific ancestor that two of them shared.

I then took that ancestor's information to wikitree.com and looked him up.  He not only existed on Wikitree, but one of his descendants had actually taken a 23andMe test and had entered that information in, as well as his GEDMATCH number.

From there it was a simple report from GEDMATCH which then confirmed my family is also related to this 23andME user, probably through this newly discovered WIKI relative.

I have yet to find the connection to me, but with little success like this,  my brickwall is coming down piece by piece.