Susan, You said, "there is such a thing as putting all the eggs in one basket and when they hatch we find a goose, a chicken, and a duck among perhaps a bunch of others." Quite right. SNPs and STRs aside, I think we too often forget about NPEs. One project administrator, who also is a good researcher, recently posted that she believes 10% of her project members descend from NPEs. There are at least six identified NPEs in my project of 220 members, I have a half-dozen small clusters whose origins are as yet unidentified, and I have about 30 project members in my "Unassigned" (to a cluster) section. There must be many additional NPEs among these. I have one project member who traced his ancestry back to a small town in Massachusetts circa 1780. He was not genetically close to anyone else named Burns/Byrne, but he was close to two other surnames, one of which traced to Rhode Island about the same year. In correspondence with the administrator of the third-name project, I found that one of his members had an ancestor who had lived in both the Rhode Island and the Massachusetts towns. Now do I have a suspicious mind, or what? Anyway, my point is that whenever two surnames seem to be of common origin, one must consider the possibility of an NPE. Also, anyone who claims to trace their pedigrees back for more than a few centuries has great faith in the morality of their ancestors (not to get into the possibility of unrecorded adoptions, etc.). Paul