Sounds like you're doing everything right, regardless. I had a relative handful of pretty close DNA relatives, and not one of them were even remotely familiar, and where I could check, not even one family tree hooked in to mine. And the best part was, not one of them returned my pvt msg.
I have close to a dozen “new” relatives that have gotten back to me.
Including one yesterday. We have a clan going back centuries with some interesting history re the British King for a Day and his Cardinal.
Also, one helped to correct some bad oral history. Her Mother didn’t die in the 1918 flu epidemic with her father, an uncle of mine. She lived another 50+ years. Her niece, my new second cousin thought that we had died.
“I could check, not even one family tree hooked in to mine. And the best part was, not one of them returned my pvt msg.”
For over a month, I have been beta testing some new stuff on Ancestry.com
Even if new people didn’t show their name, and they had paid for a DNA test.
Ancestry would post the following re their DNA results and ping me if they appeared to be related:
Trees, Ethnicity, Shared Matches
I could check, on the above, even if their family tree was quote private or not listed.
Also if they blocked everything about them and used a relative’s tree which was open and approved by the relative or descendant, I could access that tree and gather a lot of DNA data/names.
I private mailed them with a link to my tree re our possible ancestors.
A good % got back to me and were very positive and thankful.
Most never got back to me, and one reported me as abusing the system. She had nothing but private on her profile and tree. Yet, she was part of a fairly large family that had no restrictions on accessing their tree. I accessed that family tree from a suggestion by Ancestry. We had several possible relatives, and I sent her a private email with those possibilities. She apparently flipped out.
A profession genealogist didn’t like a similar situation with a paying customer.