Kerry Raymond wrote: > So it seems to me that DNA matches are much the same. There is a high > probability that they are related, so you hardly want to forget about them. > But you still have to plug away and collect the birth, marriage, death > information etc that leads to working out what that relationship might be. No, there's more to it than that. I can establish that John Edwin French is my cousin. I can also establish he and I both descend from John Enos French, 1845-1891. Now there are hundreds of males surnamed French who have the evidence of descent from one of a couple of dozen people surnamed French in colonial America. Say there are twenty. If a Y-DNA test establishes a match between John Edwin French and one of these others, it eliminates nineteen potential lines of descent from our search plan. -- Wes Groleau Pat's Polemics = http://Ideas.Lang-Learn.us/barrett