I am intrigued by Israel Pickholtz's suggestion that even an
endogamous population like Ashkenazi Jews can make use of small
segments. I am wondering if the fact that prior knowledge that these
distant cousins trace back to a person with the same name is a
necessary condition to use small segments. Our group is looking at a
number of people with ancestry back to a small area in Latvia, and
though we are linked together by being a descendant of a particular
family (Skutelsky), there are probably many other family links among
this group, since the same families kept marrying among each other for
many generations in the region, which was at the "end of the pale." I
have the feeling that it may be very likely that we would find broken
segments among pairwise comparisons that overlap unbroken segments.
While I don't know what the probability that these broken segments
identify true matches, I am going to start looking for these as clues
to follow up on.

Judy Simon
Monterey, CA

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 3:23 AM, Israel Pickholtz IsraelP@pikholz.org
<dna@lyris.jewishgen.org> wrote:

Where I demonstrate conclusively that Roberta Estes is correct, at
least in certain cases, regarding Small Segments (and Endogamy).

http://allmyforeparents.blogspot.com