Thank you for this thought provoking response. You are absolutely right - the position is not always clear cut. I’m sure many people will have clear and uncomplicated results but it might be interesting to see something more complicated. My results seem to be affected by the marriage of one set of great-grandparents (they were second cousins), my Mormon branch, and apparently by the “sameness” of Welsh ancestry.
I used the new tools to “paint” the matches designated as fourth cousins and closer, now standing at 339.
Firstly, the closer than fourth cousin relatives (9); then the mormon branch (27); then the other identified relatives (6); then the largest group, the peculiarities.
At first glance: It looks as if my known Welsh matches are generally smaller and further than might be expected; this doesn’t affect most of the members of the Mormon branch.
Beyond those 42 identified relatives in the fourth cousin or closer block I have only about fifty matches who are Welsh or have recent Welsh ancestry who look as if they should be traceable. Then there are loose groups of Americans with more distant ancestry in West Wales - some from another set of Mormon emigrants. Then some very large tight groups of Americans who seem to be “red flag” clusters.
My Welsh third and fourth cousins tend to appear as distant cousins, and my known fifth cousins don’t generally appear as matches at all. When I took some of my known distant cousins on Ancestry, who are not Ancestry matches, over to GEDmatch I found they are matches at 10cM to 20cM+ there.
So there are patterns emerging that I can can test.
