Can I get any more people on 23andMe to accept?

So in my first blog, I talked about the need to work on our family trees as the basis of successful genetic genealogy. And I have been doing just that. Working on the trees, studying the parish records and had some success, given the invested time.

For the purpose of this blog, I would like to return to my "home" DNA testing site - 23andMe.

Out there, I have almost 2800 unaccepted requests for DNA sharing. Yes, TWO THOUSAND, or rather close to three. This is frustrating. Very.

I want to do an invitation wave - send messages to my unaccepted matches, urging them share (hello, if you're actually reading the blog). And I want to measure the impact and share it with all of you.

So where do stand we with matches on 5 of my most interesting kits?

	DNA matches	Accepted	% accepted
me (Kuba)	918	308	33.55119826
m. grandma	1076	461	42.84386617
p. grandma	898	291	32.40534521
m. grandpa	911	279	30.62568606
wife	882	228	25.85034014

As you can see, I have worked most on my maternal grandmother. I have not particularly worked less on my wife, but I tested her year and something later then my grandparents (and I owe my numbers to the work on the grandparent matches).

What can we realistically expect? I would be happy if we get 20 matches per my grandparents (this could lead to more than 20 for my kit, if we're lucky) and perhaps 40 for my wife.

What will do? Write a common message to everyone.

Hello, 

my name is is Kuba Krchak and I am living in the Czech republic. I work as a computer scientist, with huge interest in genealogy, genetics, population genetics, next generation sequencing et.al. 

I maintain a blog bgengen.blogspot.com, where I just wrote about the struggle with matches on 23andMe. Please, check it out if you have a little bit of time. http://bgengen.blogspot.cz/2016/11/can-i-get-any-more-people-on-23andme-to.html

I am trying to work on the project of creating a recombination map for me and my family and eventually mapping the DNA to ancestors. 

You are one of my unshared matches and you accepting my sharing request would tremendously help me in my efforts.

I am eager to talk to you about your ancestry, but that is optional. Just accepting my sharing request is very valuable to me. 

Here is my basic public tree: www.wikitree.com/treewidget/Krchak-1/5 

My most up-to-date tree is http://krchak.myheritage.com

I also do have an ancestry tree: http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/82403601/family

My gedmatch ID is M240291. 

Best regards, 

Kuba 

kuba.krchak@gmail.com

We will slightly change it when writing to the match of a grandparent/wife, to include their information (tree, gedmatch, ..).

Let's do this and hope for the best. I will try to follow-up in a week with details how successful this campaign was. If you have any ideas, how to improve this approach, I am all ears.