Unfortunately the large American settler families have very large numbers of people who have tested meaning you often find surname projects have several very very large American groups, a few smaller ones and a very very big unmatched section.
When you consider the 300,000,000 population of America is made a up of a diverse mixture of European, African, Asian people, and it is they whose results mainly make up the database, it gives a very poor representation of Britain's modern 70,000,000 population. It would be nice if it did, but it just doesn't.
The average Brit who takes an STR test without finding some good possible matches to test also, will more than likely not find a match. They would be better off taking SNP tests or mtDNA tests. At least they would definitely get something for their money...
To be relevant to some of the recent posters, let's look at the prospects for them. If someone of the surname Garrad or Etchells tested what are the odds of them finding a match? It looks pretty grim to me.
Although there are many projects, particularly those for common surnames, which are dominated by Americans, there are also some projects which have very good representation from the UK. In my Devon Project, for example, only about 10% of the nearly 300 members are Americans because most of them can't meet the project entry criteria. The Brits are by far and away the largest group in the project, but I have project members living in many different countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Argentina, France, Japan, etc). The Brits are in fact the second largest group in the FTDNA database after the Americans. The Australians and Canadians have also embraced DNA testing and many of them have well documented pedigrees where it is easy to make the connection with the UK. A lot of the British-led DNA projects are those run by members of the Guild of One-Name Studies, many of which are for rarer surnames. There are also many projects which are now offering free DNA tests to people with documented British ancestry. If anyone is interested in testing they should check the list first to see if they qualify for a free test:
http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Free_DNA_testsIf someone wishes to take a Y-DNA test to find matches with the same surname then they should check the relevant surname project first to see how many people are in the project and where they are from. If there are no documented British lines in the project then they probably will not get much out of the test. However, I do know some Brits who've tested and had matches with Americans who have more documentary information than they do. This can be particularly helpful if someone is perhaps brickwalled in London. There are also many surnames for which there is currently no surname project. Etchells and Garrard are indeed two such examples. A single Y-STR test for either of these surnames would not actually be very helpful unless other people with the surnames were tested for comparison purposes.
Whether or not there is a surname project people will still get matches. It's just that the matches they get will not necessarily be very relevant. In my Devon DNA Project only about 5% of the project members have no matches at any of the testing levels, and not even at 12 markers. At the other extreme I have an Irish man in my surname project who has 19 matches at 111 markers, all with different surnames, but not a single match with his own surname.
In general people will get much more out of a Y-STR test than an mtDNA test, an autosomal DNA test or a Y-SNP test. The mtDNA database is much smaller and unless you do the expensive full sequence test your matches could share a common ancestor thousands of years in the past. The autosomal databases are in their infancy and are much more US-centric than the Y-STR databases. It's also much more difficult making the connections with autosomal DNA. Y-SNP testing is fine if people are interested in deep ancestry but currently has no practical application for genealogy.
