For those that have had voluntary DNA testing done through one (or more) of the options that currently inundate TV commercials, who did you use and what did you think of the results? Was it worth the cost to you?
I had it done. Originally it came back with a weird amount of Iberian ancestry that caused me a bit of questioning, but they redid their method and it came back exactly as I expected. It does have a pretty impressive family tree function that can really get you headed in the right direction if you use it correctly. I knew my father’s side pretty well, but it helped significantly fill in some holes on my Mom’s side.
My daughter (adopted) didn’t know who her father was. The man her (biological) mom said it was has always denied it. She was able to match with some cousins and from there did some digging and found out her real father. I don’t know if that was positive or negative since he’s not the greatest guy in the world, but I think that she would say it was worth the 60 bucks.
There have been a few threads like this. A search should show up some more information.
Mine (ancestry.com) returned exactly what I’d expected, uniform and uneventful. My wife and her brother had significant overlap, but some interesting differences related to which genes they inherited from their parents.
A really good resource for getting a deeper picture of your ancestry, is GEDmatch. It can, for instance, show you what specific populations your combination of genetics clusters with, so that, while you may not personally be descended from those regions of the world, you can get an idea of the extent to which your genetic ancestry overlaps with theirs.
For instance: the 23andMe test showed both Ashkenazi Jewish, and Italian, ancestry. But these are broad categories. Ashkenazi Jews are, essentially, a genetic combination of European; Levantine (the “Middle East”); and in some cases, Central Asian (by way of Russia.) But the different proportions of each, way back down the line, can vary a lot.
Italian, likewise, can mean a lot of things. The entire country has the genetic legacy of Germanic tribes, but the southernmost population was also influenced by Levantines; Greeks; and Normans. “Italian” on 23andMe doesn’t mean much.
Upload your 23andMe or Ancestry results on GEDmatch, though, and you can run the raw data through all kinds of interesting tools that break it down (as best as they can) by specific region. It can also show you what specific populations your own genotype overlaps with.
For example, by the broad European “K36” breakdown, some of my percentages include:
Italian 13.57
East_Med 19.42
Arabian 5.34
Near_Eastern 14.82
North_Caucasian 3.99
East_Central_Euro 2.02
East_Balkan 2.10
French 4.01
Central_Euro 1.54
“Ashkenazi Jewish” is not a category in this calculation. Neither is Greek, which is another country from which I have ancestry. But from these results I can make the following deductions with reasonable accuracy:
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Around 35% of my overall ancestry can ultimately be traced back to the Eastern Mediterranean region, which includes Greece and also Syria, Lebanon, and present day Israel and Palestine.
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The 5% of Arabian ancestry would indicate a connection to regions even farther east than that - for example, somewhere in the Arabian peninsula.
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My ancestry from Greece is more likely to have originally hailed from the southeast than the northwest, because of the relatively small percentage of “East Balkan” ancestry. (Whereas someone whose family came from Macedonia would have much more.)
It’s not like any of this stuff is earth-shatteringly important, but it’s an example of how GEDmatch can offer interesting information to someone who’s interested in geography.
I did Ancestry.com. The results were what I expected, although as an African American, I entered with the expectation of western Africa and a bit of European, so my expectations were very broad. It stated that I had a significant amount of markers from one specific region, and I got a bit attached to that, only for the percentage to drop down to 1% after an update. It connected me with cousins who were able to fill in gaps in the family tree and give me a picture of my great grandparents that our branch of the family didn’t have. My grandmother and father each have a copy hanging up at their house now, which was definitely worth the cost of the test.
Did both Ancestry and 23. 23 showed a smidge of Native American, while Ancestry did not. Otherwise, predictable.
I would love to do this. How does one get hold of the raw data from 23andme? I’m not seeing that as an option.
My ancestry results revealed an amount of Ashkenazi DNA that would be accounted for by a great-grandparent being 100% Ashkenazi. Given what I know about our family history, that would have to be the great-grandfather who emigrated from Germany in the 19th century . I’d like to find out more about that.
nm. Found it.
My sister gave our mom 23 & Me for Christmas. It came back with an area of Poland that we know our family came from as well as a chunk of generic eastern European, so no surprises there. I expect if my sibs or I did it, it would also zero in on the area of Poland where our paternal grandfather came from.
I’ve tested with 23andMe, MyHeritage and Ancestry. Started with 23andMe, discovered that was a poor choice for genealogy and did both MyHeritage and Ancestry to see which was better to recommend to close family.
I’ve used my matches, and my father’s and grandmother’s, to confirm that my paper trails are correct at least as far as great-great-grandparents are concerned, and have a few matches that indicate correct lines further back, and hope eventually the matches will be helpful to add to the lines where the paper trail becomes ambiguous or too sparse to follow.
I hope those who’ve tested at two or more sites (e.g. ancestry and 23andme) will upload BOTH results (under two different names) to GedMatch — its FREE! — and compare. We’ll learn which site’s methods are better, and also see how stable the DNA results are.
Thanks for the replies. I just got an email from Ancestry that their tests are $59 (for St. Patrick’s Day :rolleyes:) so I guess I’ll go ahead and get one. They’re regularly $99 but I’m guessing that they go on sale a lot. I’ll definitely upload the results to GEDMatch.
I had the ancestry bug for a while. I wish I had gone straight to FTDNA and sprung for the FamilyFinder and Big Y (since I’m male) test, rather than hitting up multiple services and paying for progressively more expensive tests. But I had no way of knowing I’d be going that deep into the rabbit hole.
One thing I definitely didn’t need is having several illegitimate 2nd cousins fall out of the tree and try to use me as a vector to get established in the family. I am sympathetic to adoptees in general, but the ones I met are just fucking nuts. Yes, I’m sorry your mother gave you away in 1961, I’m sorry she has been rebuffing your attempts to reconnect for 20 years, but I never even met her and I’m not going to upset my own loved ones by attempting to mediate that shitshow.
Did Ancestry, 23, and FTDNA. They disagreed considerably on where my ancestors were, but all found people I know through genealogical research are relatives.
Wow… I’m part Oceanian?
Wow… my 50% German and 25% French aren’t detectable?
One of the things I’m hoping to determine is my native American heritage. If ancestry.com is to be believed, I should be 1/8th Cherokee but my mother never mentioned it. The records are sketchy because it looks like my grandmother might have been adopted by a step-parent after both of her biological parents had died.
Hopefully it will be detectable.
Ancestry.
84% Western European/German
11% England
5% French and some other western European.
I still have family in Germany so I wasn’t surprised by the high ratio. Was a bit surprised by the presence of French.
Oh also on 23andMe I got initially 1% Japanese and like 99% British/Irish, which is laughably improbable from a historical perspective (a Japanese person cross-bred with a British person in the late middle ages? I kinda doubt that).
Some time later that result dropped off my reports. What a surprise…
I went from 98% eastern European Jewish, 1% Great Britain, 1% unknown, to 100% eastern European Jewish as they tracked down that mystery DNA. I hadn’t been back to Ancestry since I took the test until I read this thread. On the site I found an old message from someone who matched with me, turns out she’s a 2nd cousin once removed, and her family has now been added to the family tree. 
The following is a cut&paste from my post from a few weeks ago, with a (possible) update
I’ve done both 23andme and ancestry.com. While the percentages differed slightly, both showed 96% or so Northern European (English, Scottish, Irish, German). Neither indicated the presence of American Indian blood. Oral history says that there was an American Indian in one line of the family. I haven’t found any going back as far as 1800, where some of the lines trail off. Maybe there was one, but no one can give a person’s name, or what specific line it was in. My gut feeling is that it was one of those made-up stories to explain the somewhat darker complexion of some of the family, since in the Deep South, the suspicion that someone might have a drop of Black heritage could have had dire consequences.
The real interesting story, though, will be what we find out next month. My wife was adopted, and she has NO information on her biological family. She also did 23andme some the same time I did, but her closest relatives were 3rd cousins, which, if you don’t already have some leads, makes it challenging to narrow down.
The ancestry.com results are in now, and we got a hit on a first cousin. Based on my own experience, I am 100% certain that this first cousin is legit. With that, we think we know who her biological father is (and if we’re correct, he is still alive, and lives only three hours away).
Assuming this family line is correct, her biological father’s paternal grandfather (a Swedish carpenter who married a local girl). . . got drunk and shot his wife to death in the 1930s, leaving their young son an orphan, who later did extremely well for himself in life. The very extensive obit for her wildly successful biological grandfather (at least we think it is), made absolutely no mention of his parents, or where he was born.
But it’s early in the game. We just got the results this week, and there’s a lot to verify. . . Stay tuned.
I’ve been researching my family history for more than 25 years. Having an extensive, detailed and accurate tree enabled me to use my DNA matches to verify and expand my knowledge of my main family lines.
I have established contact with dozens of extended family members I may otherwise have never known, and we have assisted each other with our research.
I have assisted three adoptees and the daughter of an adoptee to find their family lines, and I have been able to give them their family history on our shared lines.
I have uncovered an “NPE” (non-parental event) and identified the hitherto-undocumented biological paternal line of my family.
I have found the undocumented parents of my great great grandfather. Making that link pushed the known family line back from circa 1826 to circa 1450. Couldn’t have done it without DNA (unless a previously unreleased document shows up some day).
I found a link between my father and my mother’s aunt’s first husband, but going back about 300 years and on the other side of the world. It means my mother’s first cousin is my father’s eighth cousin, but my parents aren’t related to each other.
It has been a truly remarkable journey. I’m addicted to inspecting my new matches, finding new ways to sort the data and enhancing my research.
there was a story a few weeks ago where a woman used a fertility donation clinic to get pregnant apparently she had more than one egg fertilized so the first child could have siblings and part f the agreement was the male donors would never be contacted
Well the family used 23andme for the family tree and on a whim she added her daughter and found a relative on the donors side …she called them and tried to explain she was just looking for family info but it was an elderly person who didn’t understand so she just said goodbye and didn’t think anymore about it
Well she received a letter from the clinic saying she violated the agreement and they had confiscated the fertilized eggs in storage and destroyed them and terminated the contract wih no appeal but she would get a refund ……Last time I hard about it she was trying to figure out if she could sue