Ralph and James make some very valid and helpful points. For what it's worth I've just added a few thoughts of my own. 1. "A match is obvious; if in doubt it isn't one." This is not always true. RecLohs can often muddy the waters and it is also much more difficult determining whether matches are significant the further back in time you go, and especially pre-1600 when the paper records start to run out. I agree with Ralph and James that the FTDNA TiP is a much more useful and reliable tool than any rule of thumb, especially as it also copes admirably well with RecLohs and null markers. Groupings will also depend on the composition of the project and the definition of a genealogical timeframe. I would define a genealogical timeframe as the time from which surnames were adopted and records became available. In the south of England this is from the 1100s onwards for some surnames. Even if a tree cannot be constructed it is usually still possible to get an idea of the distribution of a surname from early tax records. Surnames were adopted later in the north of England. Some parts of Wales were still using patronymic surnames as late as the nineteenth century. Jewish surnames only became established in the last few hundred years. Each project will therefore be different. 2. "Making connections on too little evidence; a bad connection is worse than no connection; grouping too aggressively; boasting thereon." I think it is up to the individual project manager to decide how to group his or her results. Surname projects are still in the very early days. No study, other than the early Sykes study on just four markers, has yet published its results. What is important is that the project administrator provides a rationale for the groupings to his project members. For the benefit of other project admins it helps too if their methodology is at least outline somewhere on their project website. What works for a small project might not be manageable for a large-scale study. It would also help if other project administrators followed James Irvine's excellent example and published papers outlining their own methodologies. One would expect to find the match rate varying considerably between surnames with low-frequency surnames having a higher match rate than more common surnames, but there will no doubt be some exceptions. It will be interesting to see what emerges as more studies start to publish results. A high match rate could just be a result of sampling bias. If one person emigrated to the US in the 1600s and produced huge numbers of descendants and only people with this surname in the US were tested then the project would have a very high match rate. A completely different picture might emerge if all the lines were tested in the country of origin instead. I've not done the stats but I know that in my own project my American project members have an exceedingly high match rate with most of them falling into one large group. The rate is much lower for my UK participants, and I have lots of singletons waiting for matches. If my Americans don't match their own surname they usually have a 67-marker match with another surname instead. As Ralph has pointed out, paper trails can also be wrong, and this can sometimes lead to incorrect groupings within a project. 3. The major goal is crossing the pond. This statement only applies to American projects. UK participants, for example, do not tend to be interested in crossing the pond and finding matches in the US. For the origin of my surname I'm more interested in finding matches across the English Channel in France and Belgium. Surely the major goal of any surname project should be to collect as many DNA samples as possible to represent all the major lineages for the surname? This means recruiting in all the countries where the surname is to be found with the priority to test documented lineages from the country of origin to serve as a baseline. More importantly it means presenting the DNA project in such a way as to appeal to potential project members from around the world. There are far too many projects which seem to concentrate only on the surname in the US on their website and then wonder why they can't attract testees from other countries. The emigrant lines to the US are just a small subset of the surname, even if some of the trees are exceptionally large. Debbie Kennett http://www.familytreedna.com/public/CruwysDNA http://www.familytreedna.com/public/Devon