I guess it all depends on what you call "a lot," and whether finding "a lot" was your goal. I'll consider the money well spent and the effort worth while if it helps me break through even *one* brick wall. Perhaps we should do a survey... I have a total of 186 matches, over 50 of which are 4th cousin or better, and 10 of which have been confirmed on paper (i.e., a check of their GEDCOM shows our paper pedigrees intersect). Is that a success or a failure? The impediment here is that the majority of subjects have not uploaded a GEDCOM. In fact, I just checked... only 61 out of the 186 have uploaded a GEDCOM. The other hindrance is the number of people who do not include locations in their GEDCOM. For common surnames, I'm simply not going to pursue a lead where I don't know the family is in geographic proximity to mine. Diana > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:autosomal-dna- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Kathy Johnston > Sent: Monday, May 14, 2012 1:34 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [AUTOSOMAL-DNA] FF clients not uploading GEDCOMs > > > Forgive me, but you are not being at all realistic about > > the odds of finding a relative. > > I think you will find relatives, but you are not likely to find a > lot of 3rd and 4th cousins.? Your matches are much more likely to be > very distant. To be realistic, you really need to do the math. > Figure out how many 3rd and 4th cousins you expect to have living > today on this planet and then figure out the number of people who > would have to be randomly tested to get a large enough sampling of > the population to reasonably expect that a few actual 3rd or 4th > cousins will be among them. The majority of those predicted or > suggested to be 3rd or 4th cousins on your match list simply are not > likely to be 3rd or 4th cousins based on probability alone. You need > a critical number of about a million testees to reasonably expect > even just a few to show up. You can figure 4 children per couple or > even 8 children per couple who lived to have more children and you > would have to agree that FTDNA has certainly not met the critical > number of testees to reach the significant level needed. Ke! > ep in mind there are about 313,000,000 people living in the U.S. > alone and only a tiny percentage of those have been tested. > > Kathy J.