Ralph Many thanks for sharing your interesting paper. One of the big difficulties in any surname project is overcoming the inherent US bias in the data. From anecdotal evidence and my own observations, it would appear that many surnames in the US have been the subject of founder effects with one emigrant ancestor often accounting for thousands of living descendants. In contrast the lines in the British Isles are often on the verge of extinction, sometimes with only a handful of living descendants. If therefore you have one line in America with 2000 living males and five lines in England, each of which have only two descendants, if you take a random sample, you are highly unlikely even ro sample anyone from the English lines. The problem is compounded because Americans are much more likely to pay for a DNA test. In practice, what this means is that Americans who take a DNA test are much more likely to have a match than their counterparts in the British Isles. In my own project I actually do all the documentary research and I am then able to target descendants of specific lines for testing. This approach is however not possible for high-frequency surnames. I'm not sure what the answer is but it seems clear that a much higher level of sampling will be required in the European country of origin than in the US. Unfortunately, most surname projects are currently skewed the other way, with a surfeit of testees from the US. I just have a few minor corrections for you in your paper. There seems to be a certain amount of confusion with the concepts of Britain and the United Kingdom which is understandable as the terms are often used interchangeably. Great Britain actually consists of England, Wales and Scotland. The United Kingdom is made up of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The figures you quote for the 20 most frequent surnames in the United Kingdom are in fact the 20 most frequent surnames in England and Wales as the data have been extracted from this website: http://www.taliesin-arlein.net/names/search.php You might find data for Scotland on the Scotland's People's website. I'm not sure where to look for similar data for Northern Ireland. Similarly the figure you quote of c.59,000,000 for the 2001 population of Britain is in fact the figure for the population of the United Kingdom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Census_2001 When looking at historical data I find it's usually easier to avoid any references to the United Kingdom altogether and focus on the individual countries. There are some useful population statistics on the Gendocs website which you might find interesting: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hitch/gendocs/pop.html Debbie Kennett