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Hi,
I have recently had the DNA results I sent in for my Mother In Law 

Hello Beverley

If you didn’t test with MyHeritage, then may I suggest you upload your test results to MyHeritage, as they seem to have better coverage of Scandinavia. Uploading will be free, but you may have to pay a small fee (there was a recent free offer but I think this has expired) to be able to contact DNA matches and to use the excellent and easy to use tools on the site such as the chromosome browser.

There should be new matches rolling in on all the sites over the next 6 plus weeks as people get around to sending in their Christmas gift test kits.

Sometimes it just takes a while for that key match to turn up to solve a mystery. When you say you have found only distant matches, how many centimorgans are you talking about? Sometimes the amount of DNA can reduce very quickly over the generations and a potential half great niece of your mother in law  may not always share that much DNA but may still be a key contact. On the other hand, especially on Ancestry, you can end up with tens of thousands of matches based in the US with no trees with less than 10 centimorgans which is not helpful.

Good luck.

My sympathies- a very unpleasant thing to have happen. You can also contact the person directly and ask them to make the changes immediately - there should be a clickable version of their username showing.

It may ‘just’ be carelessness and not being very ..ahem ... active ...in the upstairs department - perhaps they accidentally haven’t ticked the living box. In this case they may be very happy to quickly make the change.

 However I do appreciate there are some arrogant and inconsiderate people in the world who may not respect your wishes and it is not reasonable to have to wait while Your request slowly winds its way through the familysearch.org system. If you have an evening in front of the TV planned, you could combine it with pushing your way through the familysearch.org chatbots until you get a real person. Most queries get automated replies but if you keep replying and asking to speak to a real person, hopefully you will find that person very responsive. I have only done this once - and for an unrelated issue- but when I finally got through to an actual person they acted very promptly. It did take several hours of turning around automated replies.

I never include living people at all, so the information about them cannot be revealed by accident or otherwise - you might want to recommend this approach to the individual messing around with your tree. My personal approach is to not even include the quite recently deceased, because I would never want to upset anyone.

Good luck.

Thank you very much Shaun for you helpful response, that Gazette entry makes it very clear.

I had briefly wondered about that but further down the page another man had the note “Commissioned” so I thought “Dis. to comm” must mean something else.

Just to endorse the comments from Carclyn.

No-one taking their family history seriously does a DNA test for the ethnicity results. I can not remember when I last looked at or thought about my ethnicity results, but I check my DNA matches most days. They are enormously helpful, confirming some lines, and leading me to the identification of a 3 x great grandfather (you still have to do the documentary research to make sense of the DNA results of course).

It is perfectly reasonable to choose not to do a DNA test. However, please do not  mix up the benefits of DNA matching with the lack of value obtained from ethnicity results.

I see that you did not mention AncestryDNA in your original post. My findings are that I have much more success in analysing my Ancestry matches than I do at MyHeritage, FTDNA, 23andme and gedmatch.

My experience is the opposite- I have found MyHeritage so much more helpful than Ancestry for DNA, partly because of the chromosome browser but also because a higher proportion of matches respond. In my case, Ancestry produces huge numbers of low CM matches based in the USA, but few respond or have helpful trees. I also prefer the tree linking tool on MyHeritage to ThroughLines, though I suspect this reflects the relative quality of trees available on the sites rather than the relative quality of the tools themselves.

If  I had my time over, I would not bother testing with Ancestry, even though I use their records all the time, love the search engine and would definitely keep my general subscription.