has anyone else here have this problem?

[Darren]

Hi crossover, if you want to private message me a contact email address for you along with the match's name and email address listed, I would be happy to see if I have an alternative email address listed.
-Darren
Family Tree DNA

[crossover]

If Firefox is your browser, go to Tools, Options, Applications and choose your preferred email program from the list and save your choice. From then on,your chosen program will open when you click an email address. Other browsers are probably similar.

Of course, you can also just copy and paste the email address into an open blank email.

ok figured out a way to email them now, but it turns out one of the matches's email is dead so i got a failure to email notice, and not sure if yahoo sent it to the other matches's emails or not

[MoberlyDrake]

If Firefox is your browser, go to Tools, Options, Applications and choose your preferred email program from the list and save your choice. From then on,your chosen program will open when you click an email address. Other browsers are probably similar.

Of course, you can also just copy and paste the email address into an open blank email.

[crossover]

Why do you have to have Outlook to do it??? I use Gmail.

I've contacted every match I've gotten, starting back in 2010. I can't say that it's helped.

for some reason when i click the mail button for each of my matches and box pops up asking me to set up outlook.

[MoberlyDrake]

Why do you have to have Outlook to do it??? I use Gmail.

I've contacted every match I've gotten, starting back in 2010. I can't say that it's helped.

[crossover]

Concentrate on the 2-4 cousin and 3rd to 5th. Contact those matches asking them to share a tree if they don't have one visible or to give you more info on their ancestors. Also ask them to test older relatives if they haven't already.

unfortunately i need outlook in order to do that, and outlook is hard to set up plus i don't like using it.

[Armando]

well many of her matches are either 2-4 cousin range, 3rd to 5th, and remote.
she's ethnically mexican since both of her parents were from mexico and their ancestors have lived there for at least a few hundred years, and more for her amerindian ancestors

Concentrate on the 2-4 cousin and 3rd to 5th. Contact those matches asking them to share a tree if they don't have one visible or to give you more info on their ancestors. Also ask them to test older relatives if they haven't already.

[georgian1950]

I've noticed that while my mom has over a hundred matches on ftdna, i can't figure out how any of them are related to her, and for the few that have trees the last names are remotely familiar and the locations of ancestors aren't close to where my mom's ancestors came from.

For those of you that have all kinds of disparate matches that you cannot explain, please take a look at a thread that I started and try comparing your kits to my kits given within:

http://forums.familytreedna.com/showthread.php?t=37306

If you have not uploaded your kit(s) to GEDmatch.com, you will need to go ahead and do that first. My Family Finder matches are all over the place, but fortunately I have found the information that brings the majority of them together. It might be the explanation you have been looking for, so at least give it a try.

[crossover]

well many of her matches are either 2-4 cousin range, 3rd to 5th, and remote.
she's ethnically mexican since both of her parents were from mexico and their ancestors have lived there for at least a few hundred years, and more for her amerindian ancestors

[Armando]

I should have mentioned that most 4th Cousin - Remote Cousin matches are false matches or too far back to find the common ancestor. Many of the 3rd Cousin - 5th Cousin and 2nd Cousin - 4th Cousin are really more distantly related if they aren't false matches so if they have a lot of brick walls in the past 12 generations then it is very hard to find the common ancestor.

You could always email them and see if they have older relatives that have tested and see if your mother also shares DNA on the same segment as the older relative and then try and find out where the possible common ancestor is from.

Genome Mate is a great tool that assists in triangulation on specific segments. https://www.genomemate.org/

[MoberlyDrake]

My mother has 31 2nd to 4th cousins and 70 3rd to 5th cousins. I have been researching her family for 15 years and looking at DNA results since this test came out in 2010, and I have identified common ancestors with only 2 of those matches. One I asked to test in order to verify an NPE. The other I identified because of a sizable shared segment on the X chromosome which indicated descent from a recent German or French immigrant.

Who are all the rest of these people??? It's really getting frustrating!!! I can say that a few of the closest ones have Duncan ancestors and my Duncan line comes to a standstill with the unknown parents of my mother's 2nd great-grandmother, born around 1810. However the common ancestor for her closest Duncan matches seems to have been born in the 1600s! FF is no help at all here.

I don't know how other people manage to identify common ancestors. You would think the fact that only one of my mother's grandparents had colonial American ancestry would make this easier.

[S9 H9]

How close are your mother's closest matches in Family Finder?

Most people will have a vast number of distant cousins with whom one shares a relatively small (say 10cM) segment. Often it will not be able to identify the most recent common ancestor with any one of these distant cousins, for several reasons.

[Armando]

Matches are normally at least from the same ethnic group. Sometimes people that are mixed don't include the ancestors from one of the ethnicities. What is your mother's ethnicity or ethnicities?

[crossover]

I've noticed that while my mom has over a hundred matches on ftdna, i can't figure out how any of them are related to her, and for the few that have trees the last names are remotely familiar and the locations of ancestors aren't close to where my mom's ancestors came from.