CMs and shared segmen

[350445]

finally have all my tests completed and I'm most interested in the family finder presently.
My questions to the FTDNA community are:
1) What level of CMs begin to seperate the wheat from the chaff?
2) is it more important for more shared segments at less CMs or fewer segments shared but more CMs in the segment?

Thank you all in advance for your insight!

[MisterAcoustic]

Hello,

Disclaimer: I am a COMPLETE amateur/newbie at this. The answers I'm about to share seem to fit my situation, but I don't doubt that I'm wrong in many ways. In addition, it would be helpful if you could mention what your goals are - the answers might well be different for different circumstances.

1) For my situation, I've settled on around 12 cM as my cutoff point. This is because right now, I'm focusing on close matches.

2) For my situation, fewer but longer segments are more interesting, as they tend to indicate closer/more recent relations. More shared segments but smaller overall tend to indicate a more distant relative that perhaps hails from the same region your family originated from.

Once again, take this with a huge grain of salt, and hopefully someone else with more experience will give you more accurate information.

[mamoahina]

finally have all my tests completed and I'm most interested in the family finder presently.
My questions to the FTDNA community are:
1) What level of CMs begin to seperate the wheat from the chaff?
2) is it more important for more shared segments at less CMs or fewer segments shared but more CMs in the segment?

Thank you all in advance for your insight!

I'm no expert either, but from what I've seen, particularly in heavily endogamous groups (I come from one), the more segments and smaller "longest block" will indicate more inbred or that you have multiple or many more common ancestors.

But normally as the total share diminishes, so does the longest block (largest segment) and the number of segments will obviously become smaller.

I get numerous segments, large totals too but my longest block rarely goes over 15cM.