Kathy - take the plunge - you will be rewarded for it. atDNA is a very poor tool to test a theory - there are just too many variables. It's a great tool to find cousins and "prove" some blood lines. I've put my comments in brackets by your excuses... Jim Bartlett On 05/13/12, Kathy Johnston<[email protected]> wrote: OK. Here are my lame excuses to add to those already mentioned. There are several problems in producing a? GEDCOM: 1. My surname list is too big and I will need to retire from my job before I have time to generate a decent GEDCOM. It will go on forever. [As Diane points out, the GEDcom needed for FTDNA is finite and probably what you have is within range] 2. I don't want to publish something that has any potential mistakes because those mistakes will get repeated over and over. It takes too much time to verify it all. [for the purposes of atDNA matching, don't worry about mistakes - your atDNA matches are scanning your list looking for ONE common ancestor (actually a husband and wife) - they don't care about all the others] 3. The farther you go back in time, the more likely there are questionable ancestors and multiple matching lines. [yes, and what better way to sort them out than by finding other cousins who have researched the same lines] 4. I want people look at my surname list with geographical locations next to each name and not just a tree. Some of the surnames on my list are possible or probable but not proven. Maybe there is a middle name that sounds like it came from an ancestor and I believe I am on the right track because clearly the name, date and location show that surname in the same place at the same time.? Getting over those brick walls may mean showing information that is not yet proven in the pedigree. [for the atDNA matching purpose, it doesn't have to be proven - again, your atMatch is looking for ONE common ancestor, and will gloss over all the rest] 5. Even if I go back 4 generations, am I likely to randomly match any true 3rd cousins? NO!! because you need a database of over a million to find that one in a million 3rd cousin. Even if you have more than 300 3rd cousins alive today, there are over 300 million people living in the U.S. Does FTDNA test that many people? No. Are the 3rd and 4th cousin predictions accurate? Not at all because in general you are picking up the more distant cousins right now that are falling out of their expected cM range. Some of these segments are probably over 2 standard deviations above their expected size so your chance of finding the ancestor is low. What I am saying is that what looks like a 3rd or 4th cousin is really a very distant cousin. The database has not yet reached a critical sample size. So is it really worth all the effort right now? [Look at it from a different direction: all of your atMatches share a large segment of atDNA with you, and are highly probable cousins! Take that at face value and try to determine how your relate. IMO, this is a genealogists dream - getting a list of new probable cousins with whom to share] 6. Family Finder (or Relative Finder) works best if you are trying to test a hypothesis. ?For example, on the television show, at PBS, "Finding Your Roots", Henry Louis Gates, Jr. used autosomal DNA to see if an African American could have been descended from a slave owner by testing a presumed 3rd cousin who had a good paper trail. That is how this autosomal DNA should be used successfully, as a tool to test a hypothesis. These tests are not nearly as good at finding those random matches that everyone is talking about. [I disagree! atDNA is poor at testing a hypothesis, just because the shared segment may not be there for folks who are actually cousins. I've found over 60 new cousins from my atMatches - they may not all be on the shared segment, but that's what I'm finding out now through Phase III: segment mapping] So that is why I am in no hurry; I admittedly do need to work on getting a GEDCOM updated, but maybe for other reasons... [Take your time if you want, as for me, I'm trying to get as much out of atMatches as I can (we've already lost a lot of 23&Me matches who dropped out after one year. Through segment matching, I know some of their ancestors now, but can't contact them...] Kathy J.