23andme update

Today I continue sorting thru the matches on 23andme. My spreadsheet now has 910 entries.  I am sharing with 1051 people in total.  My RF matches are up to 985.  Im a bit concerned about the 1000 match threshold at 23andme, which I am very soon to hit.  I am waiting on the results from my maternal half brother Brandon and my grandfathers sister.  Should be in any day now, altho it could be about 4 weeks.

I have quite a few segments now on my fathers side that have matches with more than one person.  This is the key to finding who he is.  IF I can find the common ancestor between the two matches then I can hope that I have the same ancestor thru my father.  Of course, he may connect further back (ie an ancestor of that ancestor).

So far I havent gotten the luckiest with the information I have been able to get.  The ancestral origins of my father appear to be the same approximately as that of my mother.

Many of my matches on my fathers side have French Canadian ancestry.  I am not getting enough good matches tho to indicate that he was likely 100% French Canadian. At this time my guess is that one of his grandparents was French Canadian.

Im also seeing Southern States coming up quite a bit (Virginia, Kentucky, etc).

My time is also split as I also work on the genetic genealogy for my mothers side.

Another hurdle I am encountering is I have a strangely low number of "good" matches (say over .35%) in my 985 matches.  My top match is thru my maternal grandfather so its no help to me in the "father quest", not that she has responded yet to my RF invites from all 3 accounts.  And that match is only .49%, which is really rather low considering the volume of matches I have.

Oddly, I am also seeing many Southern States coming up on my grandfathers RF.  Many of my matches that I share with my grandfather are the same cM length or very close.  This causes me concern, and when we are both listed as probably 5th cousins, I view it as 5th cousin to my grandfather.

Some numbers of how many ancestors we could be talking about to compare:

2 parents
4 grandparents
8 great grandparents (2nd cousins)
16 greatX2 grandparents (3rd cousins)
32 greatX3 grandparents (4th cousins)
64 great X4 grandparent (5th cousins)
128 great X5 grandparent (6th cousins)
256 great X6 grandparents (7th cousins)
512 great X7 grandparents (8th cousins)
1024 great X8 grandparents. (9th cousins)
2048 great X9 grandparent (10th cousins).

Part of the trouble is practically everyone has some gaps, especially back at the great X9 grandparents level....(anyone want to report they know ALL 2048 great X9 grandparents???).  Many times when someone matches on my mothers side, I can find a paper trail to them but I know this doesnt account for the DNA as the paper trail goes thru my grandfather who doesnt match.  In some cases I can find 8 or 9 relationships, but know that NONE of them are the DNA explanation.

If my grandfather had not been available to test, I would never have been able to tell that they werent the DNA explanation, and would have believed I had confirmed paper trails that accounted for the DNA.