I have never answered Carkeet's conclusions and I'm not now but I will say one thing. He based a lot of his conclusion on the assumption that I had put up a family tree and that is how I came up with the Clemens/Langdonlinks. Now Barbara is addressing that same issue. I had NOT attached a tree to my DNA for the first several years. The DNA matches I got with Clemens and Langdon were sent to me organically by Ancestry and FTDNA (who, at the time, didn't have trees.) It was only after getting over 100 matches that I attached a tree. Regards, Susan Bailey Sent from my iPhone > On Jan 9, 2017, at 10:26 AM, Barbara Schmidt <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > Hal -- > > David Carkeet's research on the flawed methodology used to establish DNA > connections to Clemens via ancestry.com family trees was the game changer. > His essay on his months long research and first hand experiences in working > with the DNA reports is online at: > > http://www.twainquotes.com/Carkeet/AncestryReport.html > > In a nutshell, anyone can plug in a false or inaccurate family tree at > ancestry.com after submitting a DNA test, and the ancestry.com database > will generate a list of people who are also related to people in the tree > one believes is their own tree. Just about anyone can be distantly related > to someone else who ties in to the Clemens family tree in some fashion if > the family tree branches are traced back far enough. From Carkeet's report: > > "... 'What you are seeing is the result of endogamy, intermarriage within a > population group. In the year 1700, the population of the United States was > approximately 250,000 people.' In other words, it is a small world. Or, > more to the point, it was a small world, with so few people in the pocket > of immigrant history that I share with my matches that if I select a > specific name from the past (in this case, with my false genealogy, an > ancestor of Samuel Clemens), some match of mine from among my more than > 6,000 matches will descend from that ancestor." > > Barb