Ann Sorry I didn't appreciate the limited scope of your message. Intuitively one would expect the chances of finding a match with someone who is a third cousin or closer to be very low, and I would have thought most genealogists would already know who all their third cousins are and would probably have already been in contact with them through their family history research. I would imagine however that the number of third cousins that people have will vary considerably. I have just thirteen known third cousins, but I am sure that some people will have literally thousands of third cousins and their chances of finding a random much will be much higher. As certain populations such as colonial Americans and Ashkenazi Jews are disproportionately represented in the databases, anyone with descent from these populations is likely to get more matches with third cousins by chance. I do wonder if these matching algorithms are over-optimistic. With Family Finder my dad has one predicted third cousin in America. Unfortunately this match only seems to have very limited information on her family, but it seems highly unlikely that the relationship is as close as third cousins. Debbie