No matches in over 30 days. Market saturation?

[Bertp]

very interesting:

My mother's Population Finder just came in. Both my parents are descendants of British colonists with a little Native American mixed in. Both having darker features than me; I apparently took after my very fair-skinned paternal grandfather, having blond hair as a youth and sunburning easily. My father was only 1/8 Creek but give him a day or two in the sun and he could have passed as a Creek.

Here are our PF results

Father - Europe (Orcadian) 100.00% margin of error ±0.01%
Mother - Europe (Orcadian) 100.00% margin of error ±0.01%

Me - Western Europe (Orcadian 94.85% margin of error ±1.39%
Middle East (Adygei, Bedouin South, Druze, Iranian, Jewish) 4.84% margin of error ±1.38%

[ajmr1a1]

No FF statistics on the FTDNA website but list others like these:

7,109 SURNAME PROJECTS
38,244 unique surnames
244,964 Y-DNA records in the database
157,658 25-marker records in the database
137,573 37-marker records in the database
63,654 67-marker records in the database
150,685 mtDNA records in the database
20,696 FGS records in the database


Does anyone know how many people have tested FF?

[rod]

Batch 484 (expected date 11/21) has population finder results, no family finder matches yet.

[Colin]

Looks like they are only updating batches once a month now, any one know why?
Had 2 kits come up with mtDNA HV1 matches lastw eek.

[mkdexter]

Is FTDNA now just reporting FF matches once a month or perhaps twice per month?

Since July 1, I have only received results on 4 days:
July 19 I received 8 matches
Aug 10 I received 6 matches
Aug 31 I received 10 matches
Sept 30 I received 9 matches

It used to be that almost every week I would recieve 1 or 2 matches. Am I going to have to wait until Oct 31 to receive the next batch of matches? I now have 185 matches.

I thought that the recent sales were drawing in lots of new people to be tested.

FTDNA is NOT scheduling (that I know of) kits on a per weekly, per bi-weekly or per monthly basis. FTDNA reports them as the come in. If there has been a slow down, it is due to less kits coming in, or a hold due to IT changes or lab changes.

[JPHutchins]

Bulk result reporting??

Is FTDNA now just reporting FF matches once a month or perhaps twice per month?

Since July 1, I have only received results on 4 days:
July 19 I received 8 matches
Aug 10 I received 6 matches
Aug 31 I received 10 matches
Sept 30 I received 9 matches

It used to be that almost every week I would recieve 1 or 2 matches. Am I going to have to wait until Oct 31 to receive the next batch of matches? I now have 185 matches.

I thought that the recent sales were drawing in lots of new people to be tested.

[sspeters41]

Hi Teresann

I am in the same boat you are in. Lots of supposed matches, but very very few confirmed matches. To make matters worse, all my confirmed matches are on my maternal side. I have yet to even find a possible candidate on my paternal side. I have direct ancestry to many common names on his side, but nothing has turned up.

I too had hoped to penetrate some brick walls, but so far all my matches were already known on paper and not a single unknown cousin has been found. I entered the FF testing on the first day I could with the hope of actually locating unknown relatives, but this has not happened.

I think that if my proposed matches are valid, then the range of relationship is so far out that it is allmost impossible to ever find the common ancestor. I have a very good paper trail. I know all my ggg's and a few further back. A large % of my matches provide no surnames or GEDCOMS and those that do, show areas and surnames that seem to be out of place.

I am still hoping that I did not waste my money and that with time something will eventually show up.

[teresann]

You all must have methods that you use to find matches that I haven't figured out yet. While I have 300+ matches on FTDNA and well over a thousand now on Ancestry - I have yet to find any new connection. Everything I have found was already proven by the paper trail.

I guess it is good to have confirmation that genetic and paper matches - but my goal was to break some brick walls. So far I have a lot of matches who are supposedly conneced but who match nothing.

As for Ancestry, yes there are lots of matches - the one cousin match (which I already knew via the paper trail) did not identify the right connection yet both our trees were correct. I agree the data could be useful but without a "in common with" feature or raw data, in my opinion it is very cumbersome to look at anything but a one to one comparison.

How are you all dealing with the data given the lack of a "in common with" feature?

[gtc]

The problem with FTDNA is they lack operational maturity. They have power outages that wipe their database and take weeks to recover from as a recent example. There is no way in heck a company like Ancestry.com would hitch their wagon to FTDNA given that kind of example.

FTDNA does a lot of things right, but they just can't seem to avoid major glitches.

I think "operational maturity" is a good description of what's lacking. Their IT effort often strikes me as sub-par. Losing data through a power outage is unforgivable for a company that depends on data for its living. Customer communication is also quite poor.

Ultimately a company's operational culture reflects its management style. As companies grow, and more importantly as their competition grows, management capability has to grow too, or face the inevitable consequences.

[1_mke]

The problem with FTDNA is they lack operational maturity. They have power outages that wipe their database and take weeks to recover from as a recent example. There is no way in heck a company like Ancestry.com would hitch their wagon to FTDNA given that kind of example.

FTDNA does a lot of things right, but they just can't seem to avoid major glitches.

[T E Peterman]

The sensible thing would have been, rather than Ancestry.com re-inventing the wheel, they should have negotiated a deal so that Family Tree DNA could become a "content partner". They have done this with lots of other independent producers of genealogically relevant data.

That is really what Ancestry.com does best. They bring together an immense pool of content from a wide variety of different sources & then have high quality search engines to mine through all of this data.

Had they done this, based upon what I know about another content partner deal, the customers of Family Tree DNA would have had the opportunity to have opted out of inclusion in the Ancestry data.

Timothy Peterman

[NYMark]

Problem is that if you're of mixed AJ descent all but very close non-AJ matches get blocked out. They make an adjustment (inadequate imo) for full AJ to mixed AJ matches but they don't adjust the mixed to mixed comparison, so there's an enormous amount of noise.

I have not found a single non-AJ match through Relative Finder, and I don't seem to have any in my Ancestry Finder either (although I can't be sure.) I also know that I have shown up in at least one non-AJ person's Ancestry Finder when that person is not in mine, and this is someone who's a genuine if distant match based on partially phased results (in fact she's one of the 4 closest phased matches I have.)

All three sites have their issues, but 23andMe's failure to resolve a problem that has been known to exist for over a year (and their failure to disclose it to customers in advance) is indefensible.

Sorry to go off topic, but I thought I should explain.

I'm only in the mid 400's at 23andMe. I'm not worried about the limit even if I do get near it some day as my understanding is the lowest matches drop off first. There is a very good chance that a lot of the 8cm matches aren't real anyway.

[myskeptic]

I have to agree here. After a few years here with only a few confirmed matches, I got my Ancestry results last week -- at least 30 with common ancestors. I also found a few very promising leads for brick walls.

I did not immediately have my DNA linked to a tree, and it still gave me these results. The interface was very easy to use as well. I don't see how these results could be described as "useless".

Please... I have things I'd like to see improved too but what matters is that almost all my matches have trees. The last 3 months of matches here have no trees, no names, mostly small segment matches and frequently misleading or nicknames. I have only contacted 2 people so far at ancestry because I'm quite happily comparing all my cousins to each other. I suppose when I run out of matches to compare I'll start reaching out to those without trees/locked trees. In a few years, assuming I don't' find my family before then (I'm adopted) I might have time to ponder raw data. But so far, by cross referencing where cousins trees overlap, identifying locations at different periods in time etc. I've been able to quite confidently find ancestors for 4 lines along one great grandfather and have hundreds of other potential cross matches to check out.

Ancestry beats FTDNA in the only way that matters, it's effective.

[1_mke]

Have they published what they use?

I ignore anything lower than "Low" probability in any case.

I just got my third 4th cousin match which are at 95% probability. I have thirty six additional matches there that are distant and of "Moderate" probability. I have fifty one total here.

I'm going to be surprised if my high+moderate matches on Ancestry don't pass my total matches here within the next month or two

[Javelin]

I'm only in the mid 400's at 23andMe. I'm not worried about the limit even if I do get near it some day as my understanding is the lowest matches drop off first. There is a very good chance that a lot of the 8cm matches aren't real anyway.

And yet Ancestry is using segments much lower than that, huh?