Dna

[pussnboots]

Has anyone any experience with on line DNA testing sites.

[venator]

I Have done considerable family history research on Ancestry,com and traced my Scottish family back yo the 1600s. An Australian doctor with the same name paid for me to do the FTDNA test to see if there might be a link.

I received a kit to submit cheek scrapings, a quick and simple procedure.

The results showed no link, but gave a massive amount of information on my family roots, mostly Scandanavian / Scottish.

it became very complex at that stage, and I haven't taken it further.

Don't think i'd have got value for money if I'd paid for it myself, but jolly interesting,

Good luck!

[pussnboots]

Thanks Venator.

[Hypognosis]

I've no first-hand experience but that is mostly because of reading threads like this. Most people's expectations appear to be that surname-level links can be discovered, and that they can immediately append distant cousins to their tree whereas, in fact, genetic markers only point to general geographic areas, such as venator's results gave.

If *everybody* got these tests done, then these websites would have the kind of dataset required to prove who is descended from whom, so the more customers they get, the better the matchup chances are. However, I can't practice what I preach as I consider them pricey considering the vagueness of the result.

One situation where they would be worth every penny would be where an adopted child got themselves tested, provided the parent was equally curious about their fate and had got themselves tested too. That would result in a very high level of matching. Still a bit of a lottery, I suppose.

[jno]

I did a Family Finder one, and I'm happy with the results. But you need to decide exactly what you hope to find out; there are several different sorts of test. Then try googling the name of the company to see what others think. BritainsDNA produced a test a couple of years back suggesting Prince William had Indian blood, but this brought a lot of criticism for dodgy methodology.

[jno]

there's an outline here, which is not too technical

http://www.ancestry.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Basics_of_DNA

[237SJ]

I was considering doing this until I met ( in my workplace) a genetisist who worked for one of the big drug companies. He said that the results of these tests were too vague to come to any meaningful conclusion. He also said that these companies don`t publish their failure rates in a clear manner

[jno]

it depends what you're looking for, 237SJ. I was checking what races my DNA comes from - I already had a fair idea of the answer for the last 200 years and the test confirmed it even though the percentages they produced were rather dubious. And my OH turns out, from a much longer-range test, to be 1% neanderthal, which is less than half the average. But if you want to know if you're related to (say) the milkman, you may not get as clear an answer as you hoped.

[Hypognosis]

@237SJ

If you still have regular contact, I'd be interested to know what the geneticist meant by "failure rate". Surely, if the analysis goes completely wrong (on technical matters, I mean), they should let you send a second sample, for no extra cost.

Maybe s/he meant failure to find a specifically desired matchup with a target individual?

[soapnumpty]

A similar question was asked last year which I replied on at the time. See if this helps you at all. http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/History/Question1357541.html

[pussnboots]

Thanks for all replies. The test is for my half sister, she has just been told that we are full sisters and not half.

[pastafreak]

By coincidence,I was investigating doing a test myself,as I want to know a bit about my ancestral makeup.
Ancestry.com has an offer of a test for £79...but it ends tomorrow at midnight. http://dna.ancestry.co.uk/?s_kwcid=family+tree+dna&o_xid=64490&;o_lid=64490&o_sch=Paid+Search+–+NonBrand

I've also considered a ongoing protect run by national Geographic.
.its a worldwide mapping of the movement of our ancestors. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com

[jno]

that was the one my OH did, pasta - when your family marched out of Africa, which way they went and when (to within a few thousand years), when they mated with Neanderthals etc.

puss, if you're full sisters your DNA should be identical; if half sisters, only 50% or so. I would have thought you should get a clear result with that.

(Bear in mind we share about 60% of our DNA with tomatoes, though.)

[venator]

I did the FTDNA test which is mainly American, and has a massive membership, as you might expect. My Scottish name is fairly well spread throughout the States, and I was approached by lots of people trying to establish a link to the UK.

One person had a database on Ancestry.com with 24,000 names, and now that my family tree is on her database, I don't get as many contacts, thank heaven. I got interesting info from her research, of course.

The Americans are nuts about family hidtory, being such a young and somewhat rootless people. Each of the several DNA groups has a website, some of which have overwhelming amounts of information, far more than I could ever want to use.

[pastafreak]

@venator and jno...
I am seriously considering the FTDNA test. I see it's also available via TheGenealogist here in the UK. Cheaper from FT though. From which site did you order,and if from FT in America,what were the shipping costs?
I'm of English/Irish/Italian...and possibly Native American ancestry...I should have contacts all over the place.