Haplogrump

DNA testing results can vary wildly. For example, though everyone is guaranteed information (ie. haplogroups, migration maps, ethnic percentages), matches can vary wildly from person to person.

It's not always easy to not have any matches. A good indicator of why you have no matches is your haplogroup. Even if you have zero matches, you are still provided with a haplogroup and are able to track your deep ancestral origins and general migratory patterns. If your haplogroup is rare among our database, or older in origin, you may have fewer, if not zero, matches. However, those people with rare haplogroups are our lifeblood. They help open up doors to new ancestral information we either don't have enough data on yet, or are still researching. After 3+ years working here, only last week did I pull up an individual's account that had mtDNA haplogroup F. The more people with a certain ancestry, the more information about that ancestry we can acquire to provide potentially everyone with more information. Additionally, the more people that test, the higher likelihood that you will discover new, or at least one, match. This is a group effort, and like a lot of academic discoveries, it requires a whole lot of data. Results are constantly changing. Even information on, for example, the migratory pattern associated with your assigned haplogroup or subclade might not be the same in 5 years as it is now.

As long as technology continues to improve and genetic genealogical companies acquire more data, we continue to strive for that point where everyone knows everyone in the world to whom they're related and have precise information on all of their ancestry. However, this is a very gradual process.

Until that day, if you have no matches, I may have to say that last thing you want to hear: keep waiting. It may not be tomorrow, but it may be tomorrow! Who knows? Your long-lost rain-hissing lights on-sleeping sister may be swabbing this minute.