I am a mongrel of various Eastern European, Greek, and Jewish, ancestries. I have always wondered what different bloodlines have come together to comprise my DNA makeup now. I am contemplating one of those DNA tests to do this. But there are so many different ones, online, advertised, and they all seem to charge a king, emperor, czar, and rabbi’s ransom.
If anyone here has done one of those things, do you know which is the best one for the money?
I’ve done the National Geographic one. The results are supposed to get better and better as more people do it. I dunno, it was fun but didn’t give me a TON of information. (I think I’m haplogroup K, as I recall.) Be aware that it only gives you either your mother’s mother’s mother’s, etc, or your father’s father’s father’s etc, depending.
60 Minutes sort of did a piece on these a few weeks back.
I came away from it with the strong impression that these are pretty much bullshit.
I don’t know about other tests, but there is nothing remotely bullshitty about the National Geographic tests. They are solid science. However, most people who know something about their ancestry will probably learn little new from a DNA test.
The main limitation has been mentioned: the National Geographic tests only trace the exclusively paternal line (for men) and the exclusively maternal line (for men and women). This means, for example, that a man ordering both tests to learn about his great, great, great grandparents could only get information about 1/16th of them (one great, great, great grandfather out of 16 and one great, great, great, grandmother out of 16).
The other limitation is that they often tell you what you already know. For example, I have last name that is common in NW Ireland, I trace my paternal ancestry to NW Ireland, and I found out that my Y-chromosome is strongly associated with NW Ireland. Whoopee!!
On the other hand, if my Y-chromosome turned out to be strongly associated with Greece and my family used to have a Greek milkman, that would be interesting. If you think you might be a bastard, this test is for you!!
Results can also be interesting if they show that you have a rare type associated with a specific place.
One other way the test can be useful is if you have a exact match with another person who shares your surname. There is a decent chance such people are related within the time span covered by genealogies. If the person is not a known relative but shares a known relative with you, you may be able to substantially add to your known family tree.
The mitochondrial DNA test for female ancestors is less informative because it does not have a surname associated with it. In my case, I found that the mitochondrial type was fairly common in the general area where I think my maternal ancestors lived. Again, this isn’t very interesting. It could have been interesting if, for example, my known maternal ancestors were from the Barbary Coast and the haplotype was rare and associated Norway and there was a family legend of pirates and kidnapping…
I heard an interview with one of the guy’s involved in the project and he gave an example of one of the more interesting discoveries made because of it. A woman called to complain because her tests indicated that her ancestors came from Siberia, and yet she had documented family records which traced her family line back to the 1600s in Romania. Turns out, that centuries before this, the Romanians had settled in Siberia and that some of her ancestors must have stayed in Romania, while others of them moved to Siberia. So her geneological records helped to prove that this is indeed what happened.