DNA Matching at FamilyTreeDNA

I received an email from FamilyTreeDNA last week notifying me of changes that they are offering in their Account Settings. I manage several different kits there and thought I'd take a look at what my settings are.

I did this for all of my accounts on Friday. It's a good idea to review your privacy settings for your online accounts every so often (especially for social media accounts).

At FamilyTreeDNA, under Privacy & Sharing, the first section is "Matching Preferences," where you choose what level of matches you want to see. What you choose here also affects who will be able to see and compare their results with yours.

In the screenshot below, I have added the rest of the sentence that is covered by the informational "balloon."

The choices are:

For my son, I guess I had selected Close & Immediate. What happened is that when I logged in yesterday, I found that he had fewer matches than I expected due to the change I made.

Out of curiosity, I explored what his number of matches would be under each setting.

Level of Sharing	Total Matches	Paternal	Maternal	Both
Immediate Only	9	3	5	1
Close & Immediate	12	4	7	1
Distant, Close & Immediate	1,116	889	195	1
All Levels	9,264	4,773	898	3

My comments and observations:

• Paternal and Maternal matches appear for my son because I have set up a small family tree for him, linking my husband and me to him. FTDNA uses this information to "phase" the tester's results so they can see if a match comes from their father's or their mother's DNA.
• The 1 "Both" match at the first three levels is his brother, who is also linked to him in his tree.
• There are many more paternal matches than maternal matches because my husband is Ashkenazic Jewish (endogamy) and I have British Isles and Western European ancestry. (Colonial New England ancestry has some endogamy but not as much as Ashkenazic Jewish.)
• "All Levels" includes "Speculative" matches. There are enough matches at the Distant, Close & Immediate level of sharing for me to look through (though I doubt I'll ever get to match number 1,116) that I don't need people who match my son as a speculative match to be thinking we can find a common ancestor easily.

I certainly want to find matches, but I don't know as I need to be exploring a possible relationship with a speculative match to my son, especially through my husband, for whom I can only go back a few generations. I will note that for my husband's Family Finder matching settings, at All Levels, he has 14,731 matches, but at Distant, Close & Immediate, he has only 2,522 matches.

I wrote a blog post explaining endogamy at Jewish DNA and Endogamy ~ One Example back in March 2017, when my husband had "only" 9,902 matches.