KJSHea, thank you so much for this idea! yes, i have a private tree. yes, i want to find new cousins. no, i don't want all the copy-n-pasters helping themselves to the whole thing.
so i did as you suggested, i got FTM, downloaded it, stripped it of photos and stories, then uploaded the bare-bones tree as a public tree, linked to my DNA. it has names, places, dates........everything someone should need to verify if they match up with me.
thank you so much for suggesting this.