I wonder if anyone can help. Both my wife and myself have had our mitochondrial DNA done. Mine is J* and the match distribution is pretty well what you would expect, with matches from all over Europe but a very large number in England (172), Ireland (154), Scotland (104) and Germany (164). My wife is classified as H (Helena) and yet has very few matches. She has 5 in England, 4 in Scotland, 3 in Ireland. The highest is 9 in Finland. There is a similar picture on Mitosearch. As I understand it, from reading Brian Sykes book on the Saxons, Viking and Celts, H is a very common haplogroup in the British Isles amounting to around 50% of the population of each of the 4 countries. Why then are there so few matches while mine, Jasmine, which represents only about 10% of the Isles, has plenty of matches. One possible explanation is that the profile of mutations given by FTDNA is not actually just H but is H11 - some of the matches on FTDNA and on Mitosearch are H11, though most are just stated as H. Possibly this is a rarer subclade of H and therefore has fewer matches. The readings given are HVR1 - 16278T 16293G 16311C and HVR2 143A 195C 263G 315.1C

Can anyone shed any light on this?

As a subsidiary question FTDNA and Mitosearch give matches for mtDNA and their most distant female relative. It seems to me that this isn't much good unless my wife happened to have the same most distant female relative, which is very unlikely, especially if that relative is a long time ago (I mean 17th century or such like). What might be more useful for mtDNA (as opposed to Y-DNA where the name stays roughly the same) is if the poster gave all the female relatives in her line since the name changes every generation to a different male-derived name. To give an example my wife has a match with an American whose most distant rel was called Frei from Alsace Lorraine. My wife's grandmother was called Brimmer so I thought there might be a Germanic connection. Then I realized that my wife's g grandmother was called Schofield (a North England name) and her mother was called Ellen Allen (probably Scottish) and of course these were their fathers' names so goodness knows what the female name was back in the 17th century. So what good was this information to me? Am I missing a trick or is mtDNA just not as useful for finding families as Y-DNA, which is itself not very useful.