My thread in the adoption group seemed to upset those who are only familiar with Ancestry (and not GEDmatch, or some other company's chromosome browser) and assume that the cousin prediction is accurate. Some people have had successes, but some of us do not fall into that typical "American" as one would assume.

I was only able to figure out two matches that are uploaded onto GEDmatch that are predicted close relationship here at Ancestry. My mother has two 1st - 2nd Cousin predictions, both Extremely High confidence. In fact, my mother has Extremely high confidence for numerous pages. She has a total of sixty-seven 2nd - 3rd cousins all of which are EXTREMELY HIGH confidence and two-hundred sixty-seven 3rd - 4th cousins EXTREMELY HIGH confidence.

I've been told by persistent people that these 2nd - 3rd cousin predictions are definitely accurate when I insisted that for Polynesians, it isn't the case, and it's well known in the genetic genealogy community of this phenomenon.

I have two examples of how NOT so close they really are. First one is a 7th 2nd-3rd cousin match, followed by a 40th 2nd - 3rd cousin match. I assume these matches are in order from highest to lowest, or rather from closest to more distant.

1st match: 510cM total; 26.9cM largest segment
2nd match: 331.9cM total; 22.2cM largest segment

I do have to say that out of all the close matches that my mother gets on GEDmatch, these largest segment sizes are much larger than the average she gets which is around 12cM, but totaling above 200cM total shared. My mother's 2nd highest match on GEDmatch shares 502.9cM; 20.4cM largest segment, followed by her 3rd match to a man who lives 4,000 miles away just as his ancestors have for at least 8 centuries (same for us, but 4,000 miles away) and he shares a total of 428.5cM; 25.9cM largest segment.