Julie,

Thank you for the info on FT DNA.

So far, I have gone through about 300 DNA “cousins” with two potential hits, same surname, same years within a decade or two, and same state but not county. I guess I’m down to 8th cousins. I don’t and won’t attempt any contacts with private trees. I figure for me to get any useful information, I need a few exact matched for me to bother. I have only one “brick wall”, that beyond my 2 great-grandparents the immigrated from Belfast. Of the 300, that surname has come up only once, and it was not even close.

I have debated keeping my tree private because of who I suspect are professional genealogists with trees of over 50 thousand people that are mining information. They download my info but never inquire for more info, nor respond to emails to share info. But I figured that, if anyone is out there with info they want to share, I might get contacted by keeping it public. When I had a web site, I did get some contacts from Germany, Austria and South America, but nothing for years and never any information on my English/Irish side, so I decided to post the info on Ancestry since I’m paying for it for research anyway.

Chuck