Susan Rosine wrote: Although not quite as bad as SMITH or JONES, I bet there may be way more than 120 JAMES lines in the United States I'm sure Susan is right. For the record, according to the US Census Bureau, the JAMES surname ranked 71st in frequency in the US population in 1990 -- .105% of the population (1/10 of 1%), or about one person in every 1,000. So, out of 248,709,873 people in the US in 1990, approximately 250,000 bore the surname JAMES In 1996 in the U.K., by contrast, 81,301 people bore the surname JAMES (1.63% of the total population) and it ranked 44 in frequency So far, in our James DNA study, we have 22 different lines among the 28 people for whom we have results. In other words, only about 25% of the people tested share a common ancestor. If this ratio were to hold true over time, and we assume 1,000 living James-surname descendants on average per progenitor in 1990, then there would be about 180-190 different James lines in the U.S and 50-60 in the UK. One expects that the UK lines would be well-represented in the US and elsewhere. It will be interesting to see what our surname project turns up over time. David James