The Power of the X

The players:

A chap curious what he'd learn from testing his DNA at Ancestry.

Someone who regularly monitors new matches on Ancestry over 20cMs and any with suggested Common Ancestors, ie me, a self confessed genealogy and DNA obsessive.

Assorted tested cousins who all share the suggested common ancestors, Isaac Smith Dawe and Betsey Metters (married 1818 in Devon), plus several sharing earlier generations, only a few of whom had tested at Ancestry.

Scene setting:

2017 MyHeritage: 

A match appears to myself and two cousins whose Most Recent Common Ancestors (MRCA) were the above Isaac Smith Dawe and Betsey Metters (married 1818 in Devon), one son migrated to Australia, a daughter to New Zealand back in the 1850s.
The match's tree has no obvious connection, but did contain an Eliza Cook who married in New Zealand in 1911, ancestors unknown.
Cook does feature as a married surname of another daughter of Isaac and Betsey but no known migration out of the UK for the line.
No response to "hi" message.

2018: a message received from this match asking if I knew anything about her, or any, Eliza Cook and could she have access to my tree please?
Responded, sorry but nothing obvious to help other than the DNA connection looked to be back up from Isaac and Betsey's family somewhere and she could keep tabs on progress on their tree in my online regularly updated basic BDMs of rellies and connections instead, given my MyHeritage tree is far from complete, being used to record research done at that site and DNA connections.

The connections

2022 Ancestry:

A new match over 20cMs appears (the above curious player) sharing with my maternal first cousin.

His small tree includes... Eliza Cook, married NZ in 1911. Ancestry unknown.

It didn't take much to join the dots, despite finding an Eliza Cook in the extended Dawe family, living with her mother's aunt's family in still living in Lancashire in the April 1911 census.

A passenger record was found showing Eliza and her cousin Hannah Parker departing Liverpool 28th Jun 1911 destination Wellington. 

The arrival of the "Arawa" warranted several column inches in the NZ Times of 10 Aug 1911 on its arrival in Wellington as it had been in wireless contact for most of the voyage thanks to being "fitted with the very latest type of Marconi wireless telegraphic equipment" 

So somehow Eliza met up with her newfound husband and married him in within two months of arrival (it has been suggested they may have met on the voyage as he had been in South Africa for a while)    

The message

Keep track of everything, dots do join -  eventually.

The MyHeritage match turns out to be the first cousin of the new Ancestry match, and previously unknown to each other until DNA introducing them.

But wait there's more: beware what DNA can tell you

With access to the X chromosome segment data on GEDmatch and FTDNA, (but not visible on MyHeritage) this Cook link had to be my new match's father's side not his mother's, which was a bit of a surprise, but did enable identification of which side was which in the new Ancestry SideView given his ancestral composition divided into two prominent ethnicities,  clearly separated by "side".

All power to the X- and Ancestry's new SideView. 

For further info, see Who tests the X? 
(Since this 2018 post FTDNA have revised their matching algorithms to remove smaller segments from their match algorithms, including X matches.Their totals are now more in synch with other companies and small X segments are no longer shown either.)