Ancestry Thru-lines

Ancestry.com has been rolling out a wonderful tool called "Thru-lines".  It combines DNA with family trees and sometimes projects who the mutual ancestor is.

So, each of these children of James ? Graham has a DNA match for me.  The only thing "for sure" is that each of us matches DNA (I've blurred some of the photos for privacy reasons) and we have a common ancestor.  Several of us have speculated that James ? Graham is our ancestor, so Ancestry pulled us all together.  Now whether that common ancestor is James would require us all to match James' siblings.  Since we all only match at about a 5th-6th cousin level, that isn't really possible at this time unless we find a very strong strand of DNA. Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

 That we all match at all,  is a miracle since I don't really have strong Graham genes.  His wife Sarah Broyles is where my strength is---I match her family for several more generations back.  James has a ?? because I was never very sure about him.

Also note that I am the only William Graham descendant on this and yet I know there are 31 of his descendants who match William.  Here are his children's descendants who have DNA matches:  Margaret (8), Theodore (2), Susan (5), James Madison (3), Mary Polly (11) and Thomas (2).

This means that the strand I match all of these under James, is not shared by the other 30 descendants of William.  They probably have different matches than I do.  DNA is so fickle.