I think you can't assume the autosomal databases are representative samples of the U.S. population, much less the global population. My impression is that the majority of people using DNA testing services to aid their genealogy are Americans searching for their European roots. Europeans still living in Europe don't need to search because they already know where they're from, and recent immigrants don't need to search because they still remember where they're from. We are mostly sampling from limited populations of European emigrants, populations that severely bottle-necked in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries. I wish I could remember the quote, but I think it was from Gary Boyd Roberts, to the effect that tens of millions of Americans can trace their ancestry to a core group of about 600 early immigrants to New England. I've no doubt there's are similar groups of key progenitors in other colonial populations. In Roberts's book on the genealogy of Princess Diana, he estimates that she has 20 million American cousins through her American great-grandmother, Frances (WORK) BURKE-ROCHE. I think it's no surprise that we are finding more connections than you would expect from a database that's a random sample of the global population, or even the U.S. population, because it isn't a random sample, much less a representative sample, it's a highly biased sample. Diana > From: Ann Turner > Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 1:49 PM > <snip> > > I have got to think more about the statistics here. Obviously we are > going > to hear a disproportionate number of success stories, just because > they're > so much fun. But it strikes me that we are hearing too many stories > for the > one-in-a-million number to hold true. I have a 2nd cousin once > removed at > 23andMe who tested because his daughter worked at Illumina and got a > free > kit. I tested a known cousin at FTDNA, and when she got her results > back, > she recognized the name of a 3rd cousin once removed from another > side of > her family. <snip>