I'm probably in the minority, but I've been looking forward to the purge. I have felt it will make it much easier to work with the matches that I have that are closer and perhaps keep me from falling down a few rabbit holes. If you look at the numbers and the percentage that were lost among my family's tests it seems like a lot. I feel like it is more focused now though. Before the purge I went thru and looked at the matches in the 6-7 cM range who shared a Common Ancestor with me. Some of those shared more with one or both of my siblings so I will still see them in their match list. I still have plenty of matches to work with and those matches are at a higher confidence level.
I was really glad to see that the purge took care of the Thruline that was making me crazy. I had a match of 6 cM who was showing in Thrulines as the grandchild of my Paternal Aunt. It was caused by someone attaching my Aunt's census records to a woman with the same name who was born in the same year and who also had parents similar in name to my Grandparents, Thomas DeWitt Cooke & Pearl G. Jakes Cooke. The DNA match was a maternal one though which I could see when I viewed my Mom's test though she shared the same small amount with that tester.
I hope this will show improvement across all of my Thrulines and keep me more focused. It would be nice if we had the ability to filter similar matches at FTDNA. I know you can download and filter matches at FTDNA but an onsite filter is so much more functional. All of the DNA testing sites could do a better job of match list presentation. AncestryDNA has really made improvements in theirs which make all the others look "clunky". Perhaps now they can add a search location which will search more fields than just the birth location.
