23andMe matches update

  Thank you so much to all my cousins that accepted. It was not a total win, but I think combined with the blog, the campaign was a success. I am sure we will have more accepts in the coming days and weeks.

  So last week, we started at 2793 outstanding invitations, and we were able to bring it down to

2718. Not too bad. But I would prefer 1900 or 900 or 0 :D

Well, it is, what it is. We'll just have to live with this inconvenience of not tapping into the whole 23andMe DB.

So how did we fare on the individual accounts? Let's see.

DNA matches	Accepted	%
926 (+8)	330 (+22)	35.63714903
1077 (+1)	474 (+13)	44.01114206
902 (+4)	305 (+14)	33.81374723
914 (+3)	296 (+17)	32.38512035
886 (+4)	259 (+31)	29.23250564

We did not quite reach the goal of 20/20/20/20/40, but we did not land too far from it. Additional matches over the next week might close the gap for some of the kits.

Again, my kit here is the effect of double dipping - we invite some of these matches twice (my account as well as the grandparent's account) and it can help.

One interesting thing to note for people not aware of this - getting your matches to accept reveals you new matches that are not recent. In the last week, I got between 0 and 2 new recent matches per account, but most of the kits got a few more new matches in their list. Accepting is good for increasing the amount of visible cousins.

It's not only numbers, I got my closest cousin from paternal's grandfather side to accept. Likely a 3C1R of my father. She did not react to follow-up questions and internet searches/ancestry searches ran dry. But I have a nice 5 segment match I can utilize in the future. 

I still have a large backlog of messages to work through, and I am going for that after finishing this blog. That could yield more accepts as well as more identified common ancestors.

The final conclusion is, that even for a European ("Eastern" one at that), you are able to get close to 50% utilization of the 23andMe database, without Open Sharing taking in the account (none available on the old experience). With some basic work, you're able to get around one third of your cousinship to engage (this was only my second invite wave on my wife's account).