My mom's DNA is on FTDNA. This is a question about FTDNA family tree functionality. I know that WikiTree is not in any way responsible for FTDNA functionality, but i've goggled around and can't find an answer to my question, so i thought i would ask the good folks here.
Here's the situation: I noticed a while ago that suddenly on my mom's list of matches, her Paternal tab was activated and she had 78 matches in a list, all of whom had a blue square with a white figure like a 'men's washroom' indicator.
I had linked into her tree the following cousins: a 3rd cousin on her dad's mom's side and a 2nd cousin 1R on her dad's dad's side. They have the paternal indicator and they are on the list of 78 paternal matches.
I had also linked a 5th cousin and a 6th cousin on her dad's dad's side, and they don't have the paternal indicator and they aren't in the list of 78.
A few days ago, i linked a 5th cousin on my mom's mom's side, expecting that action to create something other than a 0 on the maternal tab. It didn't. I waited 48 hours in case it needed a server update. but still nothing.
Then i read the instructions here: As far as i can tell, i did it right, except getting that cousin into the tree was a little odd because after i did it, i noticed that the connecting individuals were not right at all. The cousin had shown up as a hint, and i had accepted the hint, but the ancestors he thus was given weren't actually people in his line in his tree. So i manually corrected that. He shows in my tree, the relationship was calculated, he got the email that i had linked him, so i thought it was all okay -- but no Maternal indicator, and that tab still says 0.
So i began to wonder what factors gave my mother her 78 paternal matches and what was different about this new cousin that he didn't trigger a maternal match.
That's when i noticed that the 5th and 6th cousins who are linked in her tree aren't part of the Paternal 78. I began to look more closely at the rest of the Paternal 78, and except for descendants of my mother and the two closer cousins mentioned far above, i don't see why they are considered to match on my mother's Paternal side. Most of them don't have family trees, and when they do, i see no common ancestors. The genetically closest one has a match on Chromosome 3 that is in a similar location to my mom's 2C1R, but my mom doesn't match her 2C1R at that location, so i guess those two cousins match each other by a different lineage.
So, is a 5th cousin too distant to trigger a Maternal/Paternal category sort? Is that why the two Paternal 5th/6th cousins aren't listed in the 78, and why the new Maternal cousin didn't trigger anything?
How did most of the 78 end up on the Paternal list?
What do i have to do to trigger a Maternal list, or do i even want to, based on the seeming uselessness of the Paternal list i do have?
Any ideas?
PS: my mom is still alive so her profile is private but i think you can see her tree. Let me know if you can't.
In case it helps: a lot of my mom's Paternal side has been in North America for over 250 years, some of them for over 350 years. My mom's mom was born in England.
