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On both my mother and father's sides, I pay close attention to where a DNA match lists his ancestors as coming from. On my mother's side, where I have brick walls especially, I may know only one surname, but I know that that person was from one of a small number of founding families of a small town. For example - the families of late 1700s and early 1800s of Cumberland, County, NJ. I recognize a lot of the surnames and while I don't know how they are related to me, they are among a handful of families who intermarried frequently and when I find both the surname and the region mentioned by a DNA match, I pay close attention.
On my father's side, there is the fact that Eastern European Jews did not take surnames until the 19th century, that surnames differed in the same family in order to avoid conscription or for other reasons, and that they were then changed when the family immigrated to the U.S. On one side, our family had two competing surnames - one old Hebrew appellation and one topynymic. Another family has two competing surnames, probably to avoid conscription, and one son dropped a part of the surname, so there are three surnames. And those same families might have only had patronymics 50 years earlier and in fact might have been listed in government records by a surname related to their patronymic in the early 1800s. And it gets even worse in Volhynia, current day Ukraine where my great grandfather's surname is not certain at all. He appears to have taken his wife's surname, a common practice, but insisted upon his surname as a middle name the rest of his life. But his middle name may not even be a surname, but might be an honorific title. So I look for DNA matches from his town or from nearby towns in Volhynia and keep going from there, once I know those additional surnames.
I'm sure all of us can tell similar stories and I would urge FTDNA to refine the tools to enter region of origin and to match on them. As the matches increase, it will be harder and harder to manually scan them as I do now.
On my father's side, there is the fact that Eastern European Jews did not take surnames until the 19th century, that surnames differed in the same family in order to avoid conscription or for other reasons, and that they were then changed when the family immigrated to the U.S. On one side, our family had two competing surnames - one old Hebrew appellation and one topynymic. Another family has two competing surnames, probably to avoid conscription, and one son dropped a part of the surname, so there are three surnames. And those same families might have only had patronymics 50 years earlier and in fact might have been listed in government records by a surname related to their patronymic in the early 1800s. And it gets even worse in Volhynia, current day Ukraine where my great grandfather's surname is not certain at all. He appears to have taken his wife's surname, a common practice, but insisted upon his surname as a middle name the rest of his life. But his middle name may not even be a surname, but might be an honorific title. So I look for DNA matches from his town or from nearby towns in Volhynia and keep going from there, once I know those additional surnames.
I'm sure all of us can tell similar stories and I would urge FTDNA to refine the tools to enter region of origin and to match on them. As the matches increase, it will be harder and harder to manually scan them as I do now.