Is it just me or does Ancestry.com suck?

It is not the most intuitive website, that's for sure.

I've never entered or changed info on the mobile version or app because it gets to be a lot of content, a lot of visuals and it's just better to be on a desktop computer.

23andMe is also an interesting site for DNA info; its helpfulness re ancestry/family tree is limited.

What is your goal OP? Ancestry is mostly for connecting with other people who are into genealogy and have family trees up or finding relatives. If you're not looking for that, Ancestry isn't really all that great. 23 and Me is more about the science of genetics. Some places like Family Tree DNA and My Heritage will let you upload your DNA data for free.

Op don't apologize. So what if there's another thread. Don't like the Hall monitor nazis get to you.

Now. Carry on.

If you do DNA tests be ready for discovering an unknown relative

You'll get into heaven once your name is entered. Now say thank you to the nice Mormons.

[quote] The app and the desktop version appear not to know what the other is doing.

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I've found the same problem recently with Zillow. Has anyone else noticed this?

Any of the ancestry places are just a vehicle for collecting incredibly personal information; why would anyone submit that to an organization you know nothing about? No thanks.

I distrust ancestry.com. it's a mormon operation.

The dna information is interesting and will identify even distant cousins but you have to do a lot of work to figure out your whole tree to make sense of exactly how you are related to people.

As I recall - and I'm going back - they only go back 4 or5 generations

I started it and one of the first questions was "What is your mother's maiden name?" I thought to myself, man this would be a gold mine of information for someone wanting to steal your identity and left the site.

R10 the genetic test just tells you general ethnicity information and links you to people you share genes with. You can plug in info on your ancestors using different info you have and can go back centuries. You’ll find family trees others have made and can piggyback off the work they have done but also can double check their work.

Can't say I'm a big fan of GEDMatch!

My sister in law found her birth mother via one of those DNA companies.

It asks too much and delivers too little.

[quote] As I recall - and I'm going back - they only go back 4 or5 generations

The DNA tests go back between 4 and 6 generations.

The family tree can go back farther. Most of my lines go to somewhere in the 1700's but one of my paternal grandmother's lines goes back to the 1400s, which blows my mind.

Question for the geneticists and biologists on DL. I had my DNA completed. Can DNA trace both the paternal and maternal lineage of my mother? Or can it only trace the maternal line?

Like Liz Warren, my family tells me tall tales about our family history. There is supposed to be a European ancestor somewhere, but no European DNA appeared on my results.

R17 which service did your DNA for you?

I may be wrong but I think Ancestry and 23andMe are more general tests - there are services that will test specific lines (more expensive)

That was my exact thought, r13.

Using Ancestry.con there are two ways I know of to research R17. It doesn’t define your genes by where they came from maternally or paternally. One method is to use what you know of your moms paternal side, find that person and go from there trying to find info in other people’s’ family trees. The other is to find a cousin on your moms paternal side who has also given dna to ancestry. Then there is a link where you find relatives in their system who share genes with the two of you so that isolates those genes. Then you can explore those people for common European ancestors.

I've been using Ancestry.com for years. It was a bit clunky when it was first released but over time it became more sophisticated and useful. I can input all of my family names (apparently no limit for how many generations you can use), add pictures and documents, and share with family. I like the "hints" feature because it suggests more information you can add to those you're researching.

The DNA feature is fine, but not needed because I'm not looking to make connections but interesting to see where my ancestors might have come from. This causes the most confusion for most people. Your DNA can't tell you exactly where you family is from since one's DNA is made up of generations of DNA that doesn't correspond to a particular point in time. See how difficult this is to explain?

If you're worried that someone might compromise your identify with Ancestry.com, you can either hide under your bed in fear or mark your online family tree to private.

(R18) I had two tests done: 23 and Me and National Geographic.

Thanks,(R20).

I have learned you cannot rely on the information provided by people who provide hints to you. I now seek documents on the site, and elsewhere on the internet, to verify information given to me by others. It is possible with a little extra work.

My DNA profile is spot on. I'm a quarter Scottish, a quarter Lithuanian, 7/8ths German, and the extra1/8th matches up with the Scandinavian relative I verified. It was an exact match with my research.

I bought ancestry.com as a gift to my nephew and niece-in-law and she has discovered some answers to the questions her family has been asking for the past several generations.

I think the most important thing is to acknowledge the site does not have all the right answers in front of you. You have to dig a little, sometimes a lot. Funny thing, my grandmother spent decades researching her family through official records and family lore. I had all of the same information verified (or not) in 45 minutes on ancestry.com.

Also, once I verified a great-great grandfather in Germany, I texted his name and hometown in Google. It lead me to a highly-detailed website in Germany which, using church and municipal records going back a thousand years, connected me directly to Charlemagne, exactly 40 generations back. It has been said we are all directly related to Charlemagne, but I now have a complete record of all the generations which lead me there.

stammbaum.anverwandte.info/index.php?ctype=gedcom&ged=anverwandte

There are over 200,000 individuals listed on the site through time. If you recognize just enough German, you should be able to feel your way around.

1/4 + 1/4 + 7/8 + 1/8 = 12/8. Are you one of those fetuses in fetu, R24?

No, just terribly bad at math in my old age. 1/4 Scottish, 1/4 Lithuanian, 7/16 German, 1/16 Scandinavian.

It makes all your ancestors retroactively Mormon. Who knew.

[quote] I have learned you cannot rely on the information provided by people who provide hints to you. I now seek documents on the site, and elsewhere on the internet, to verify information given to me by others. It is possible with a little extra work.

Very true.

I made an analogy once to taking dental x-rays. You can use those other entries to get a sense of what the lay of the land might be, but obituaries, etc. and other documents are important to confirm.

I had no idea when I started that I would chase obituaries and death records but you really do, in research.

I've been doing genealogy for a long time.

Ancestry.com is only one tool that can provide information.

It is not necessary to actually store your family tree on their site, although they love it if you do. Although why anyone would put their whole family info out on such a public website I do not know. I keep mine on a private database on my own computer.

The Ancestry.com ads attract novice users into believing that all you have to do is input your grandfather's name and whoosh, there is your whole tree.

Some advice:

1. It is not necessary to input your personal information to use the site. You can simply search for individuals without specifying a relationship. Just pay attention to how the questions are asked.

2. I have found that a significant proportion, in fact most, of the trees submitted by users, are of not much value. Badly done research. By all means look at any that might apply to your family, but if no source is provided for the pieces of information, be careful in accepting it.

3. When recording your information, be sure to include the source of that information. Whether birth, marriage, death record, tombstone, immigration and/or citizenship records, census, etc. Careful research is sure to uncover contradictions and just plain wrong information and having multiple sources for data helps to find the truth. Primary sources, by that I mean the original document, NOT a text transcription, is the best source. At every step away from the primary document, errors begin to appear. Personally, I have found and verified incorrect information on death certificates (which depend on who is answering the questions), census records ( misspelling and misreading of handwritten information) and tombstones (being cast in stone does NOT mean that it is accurate).

Ancestry.com is a tool. As is familysearch.org, heritage quest, and several other databases. Make use of multiple tools

Also, what many people don't realize is that your public libraries subscribe to databases and many of them deal with genealogy. Most of these databases can be accessed from your home computer with your library card number. Most libraries have an Ancestry.com subscription, but it cannot be accessed from your home computer, only from a computer in the library.

Both.

My husband’s aunt is really into Ancestry. When we got married she tried to update the family tree and it would not let her add me as his spouse because we are both male.

This started a shit storm. She called them, emailed them, and generally raised hell. I tried to explain that adding me really wasn’t going to get her anywhere because I don’t really know my biological family, but she was adamant it would be fixed.

Eventually they did let her enter me into the system. She was pleased.

Can you do a DNA test for Ancestry.com that shows you who your relatives are, but doesn't reveal yourself to them? I am curious, but don't want to meet a bunch of randos.

As someone stated above, you can pick a username or public name that shows to others. Ancestry will ask for your info for billing purposes but if you want to be known as DollyLevi as a username then you can. So that public name is what people see. (To R29's point 1 - though you can also search without any account, though they info they'll show is limited - and also R32.)

Ancestry is an easier platform than other family tree building platforms, but most of my content has been reinforced by documentation. Some of the documentation is available on Ancestry itself.

In my case, 90+ percent of my ancestors and family lived and/or came from a specific area in Pennsylvania. For our purposes here, this was a goldmine.

(1) PA had all of its death certificates that are >50 years old scanned by Ancestry. Death certificates are a great source of info - not only for that person, but because it lists their parents, where the parents were from, and a few other pieces of info that can lead you to other connections.

(2) The particular region I am from was small enough, and had enough genealogical interest over the last 20 years, that someone had created an index of all the obituaries in the newspaper from the 1850s on. So I was able to send for a number of obits, which helped me tremendously. Again, it sounds weird, but you are able to confirm many personal details about THAT person, and then it tells you about survivors, which helps you build their info, as well.

Of course, mistakes or deliberate misinfo can be entered on death certificates and obits, too. I mentioned in the "family secret" thread that we think a great great several times great grandfather *may* have knocked up his own daughter after his wife died; in various news articles and her obit, she is listed as having a husband that never existed. My mother's paternal grandfather was apparently a rogue and spent time in prison, and it appears that he and her grandma (my g grandma) remarried others without ever divorcing each other - oopsie. (They were poor enough that divorce might not have been within reach.) But again, misinfo on the record.

R29s point #3 is important too. This is the nice thing about Ancestry. You can make notes or even scan a document onto the file.

But THAT is why you should keep your tree private, btw. It hasn't happened often to me, but I had a few photos from 1880s era of my ancestors and scanned to their pages. A few people have copied those photos, just because they collect old photos or something. Very strange.

ohhh, a hillbilly.

R34 Excuse me, I have a title.

I am Pennsylvania's Finest Trash, thank you very much! LOL

Isn't this just 3D data mining of the most invasive kind?

Do you need to send blood sample ?

lol

Not ancestry...forgot...anyway, there was this scottish guy that is genetically my 3rd cousin. Very odd since the last of my family on all sides immigrated in the 1770s. Then I researched his and my trees for clues. My grandmothers' families were related clans. He seems to have this same connection somehow intertwined and we are third cousins. Really we would be 5th or more.

Ancestry.com is easy to use. The problem is that genealogy is difficult. Nothing fixes that part of it.

Before things went online, to do any genealogy at all, you had to physically go to county court houses and sift manually through dusty old files, or physically go to state genealogical libraries, which may or may not be in your town. And the library for a particular state would have next to nothing about even a neighboring state. Or physically go to churches and ask to see old records, which may or may not be permitted. It was extremely labor intensive and if one pursued it, it was expensive.

Now you can sit on your fat ass in the comfort of your own home and use Ancestry.com or the service of your choice to access literally millions of documents. Before you could access too little. Now you can access too much. It's a giant electronic library and you still have to do the sifting. DO NOT think that online genealogical research is in any way automated. It's not. Nor did anyone at Ancestry.com verify what is there. If a book from 1830 is available to you online, that's great. But Ancestry did not vet every word. That's YOUR job.

Ancestry's smart phone app is useless, except for the very most basic things. The searches and the data and the records are just not conducive to an interface as small as a smart phone. So just forget about using it on an app. For almost all purposes, it doesn't work.

You can make private the identity of anyone you have entered into your tree. You can see it. No one else can. But don't kid yourself about privacy. Everything is available online anyway, if you have some tenacity and you know where to look. Very little is protected. Just ask that federal judge in New Jersey whose husband was shot and son murdered.

I did the National Geographic one. Well. I didn't, I got my parents to. It's fun in that they got my mother's origin down to two small islands in the Pacific Island nation she was born in.

Does 23 and Me give more genome type information?

23 and Me is better and more accurate.

R37, you don't have to do anything with Ancestry. If you want Ancestry, or any other service, to test your DNA and report to you the results, you supply to them saliva. Spit in a tube. Mail it in. That's it. In return, you get a report on your DNA. No blood.

Your DNA report is private when you receive it. If you wish to do a limited share of it with other subscribers to the service, you may choose to do so. You do not have to do so.

The DNA report is entirely separate from building your family tree. That's almost all done with online search of records. You control the research. You control what you do with the results. Include a fact in your tree, discard it, or hold it for further consideration. Your choice.

Sometimes the DNA can be helpful if you hit a wall on your own research. If you have chosen to do so, Ancestry can report other subscribers (who have also chosen to share) who have some of the same DNA that you do. You can send an electronic message to one of them with your inquiry and take it from there. I have done that myself and I have received inquiries. One man who appears to be a 2nd cousin to me was adopted as an infant. He never knew his own ancestry. I had almost all the information he needed and was happy to share. The variations are endless.

OP= PEASANT STOCK

Ancestry started out primarily as what it's name indicated: a geneological site. 23andme, as its name indicates, started out as a primarily DNA research site.

Since they began, they've overlapped considerable in order to compete with each other.

My experience with 23andme was interesting: the first report in response to my saliva test totally jibed with everything we knew about our family history - where people came from and in what percentages.

Then, they "changed our algorithm" and sent a second, updated report that deviated just enough from the first report to generate some raised eyebrows, and huh? Nothing untoward, just suddenly percentages shifting to increase DNA from regions where we had minimal history and decrease it in areas where we knew we had long history.

Then, 23andme notified me that they had "changed our algorithm" again, and sent a report that deviated so far from our entire family history that it was virtually senseless.

We do have information going back several generations, and Europe was a pretty porous place for a long time. But even allowing for the difference between ethnicity and DNA, people who moved from one place to another and then remained there for 150 years would be expected (in fact, we knew they had) to marry and breed into the newer country acquiring names (we had their names) that reflected integration into the newer country - not a drop of which was reflected in the third report, which might as well have been about someone else's family.

I suspect that 23andme uses this "upgraded report" to keep people interested, because otherwise, once they had that DNA report, they're done.

It's now several years later and I recently submitted a saliva sample to Ancestry just to compare report.

As it happens, at this point in time, AncestryDNA provides 499 regions compared to 23andMe's 171, or 328 more regions that they can tie your DNA too.

I'm not giving Ancestry an endorsement, mind, at least, not until I get that report back and see whether it clarifies, contradicts, or supports any one of the three that 23andme provided.

It's really more for fun and interest, I have nothing to gain or a need to fulfill (e.g., a new passport, new relatives, etc.). My guess is that these places aren't yet at points of absolute accuracy and still fiddling with their "algorithims".

So do it for fun but don't take it as the alpha and omega of your DNA quite yet or get too invested in it.

I should have my comparative report from Ancestry in about 4-5 weeks and if the thread is still open, I'll report on whether it did better, worse, or about the same as 23andme..

Cheers.

For years, my grandmother said that we were part Cherokee Indian. (My relatives lived in an area of the country where Cherokee were well populated). I did the Ancestry dna, but it shows no Indian whatsoever. Is there a dna test that will show the Native American gene? I don't want to be accused of being an Elizabeth Warren and say I'm part Cherokee just because my grandsquaw said it was true.

R45 yes because my Ancestry DNA has Native American as well as “indigenous” on it.

Your Grandma was wrong.

[quote]...Native American gene?

Oh, my. Fasten your seat belts.

My ancestors all came from Norway where there are lots of records. The Norwegian government is scanning all the church records that they can locate and have made them available on line.The church kept records of baptisms/births, marriages & deaths. There are also a lot of 'bygdebuks" which are farm histories. They have lots of genealogical information in them.

A comment about old records in Norway. Many of the farmers in old Norway couldn't read or write. So when the child was baptized, the minister would ask for the name and he would spell it however he liked. When that person married the minister might write down the names with a different spelling. It complicates things.

Jumping the pond (coming to America) was a different issue. People would sometimes use their patronymic name, their fathers patronymic name or the name of the farm they came from as their surname. They also sometimes "Americanized" the name. It complicates things.

My DNA testing has revealed two things:

(1) why yes, my father did actually have another kid out there

and

(2) Like Liz Warren and many millions of others, the Native American lineage we were told was in our family is not. Or at least, wasn't in the last 5 generations. None. Zero.

[quote] (1) why yes, my father did actually have another kid out there

Either my uncle or great-uncle had a kid that I don't think they knew about. Ancestry isn't distinguishing whether this person is a 1st cousin or 2nd cousin.

Upload the info to gedcom. they look for other NA markers. My tiny bit is there and "maths" out to the correct amount. VA squaw, they really didn't bring many Anglo ladies on the first ships.

Isn't gedcom and Ancestry almost the same thing? Both are created by the Mormons.

And as a PS to my post at R49

We kinda knew it was a possibility so it wasn't a total shock.

But lots of people ARE shocked by that kind of revelation.

Also, you may get stuck in the middle of something if, say, an aunt/uncle/cousin or some more distant member of your family, etc. is someone that another member is searching for. Many of the stories about reunions were cases where a member of Ancestry or 23andMe saw a cousin or something online and through them figured out who a parent or sibling was.

No, Rose. They are not almost the same thing. The Chinese are known for gunpowder and acupuncture, but that does not make them almost the same thing.

Ancestry has Mormon roots but has moved away from them as they've become a mainstream commercial company.

One of the lesser family tree information sites is 100 percent Mormon - one that was not a tree building site but more of a search engine - but the name escapes me at the moment.

When talking about genealogy with people who are interested but have not yet started research, I make a point of telling them that they should keep in mind that they very likely will discover THE FAMILY SECRET.

I've come upon several as I've researched many families over the years.

Most are the kind of incidents that today's people would hardly bat an eye about. But back in the day, scandal and dire embarrassment. And well hidden and never talked about.

Some were real family shockers that even today I have kept to myself.

I'm not interested in "Gotcha" genealogy.

But in one case, I discussed it with very, very close relatives and together we put together some "clues" that never made sense before, but with the SECRET revealed make things much clearer.

There used to be a website where researchers shared the stories about the "Black Sheep" of their family that they had discovered. Sometimes, remaining family members had clever ways of covering for truth.

One I remember was the family description of one man as "He served his government for many years" which actually referred to the deceased's long prison term.

Well duh, R43. Was that supposed to wound? Eyeroll.

Datalounge is full of Hyacinth Buckets.

Also, on my non-Mennonite branch-- my great-great-grandma died very young "in her home on the reserve" (Indian reservation) although we are definitely not native American. Was it common for non-native Americans to live on reservations back then (early 1900s)?

missionary

My bored hillbilly relatives keep using these shit sites and suddenly I've got all these new hillbilly relatives because they were all whores who were too religious for abortion (but not religious enough to not be whores) and gave twenty kids up for adoption

They are all God's children, R60. And, apparently, your mother's, too!

Does anyone know of any DNA website scandals? Like a co-worker discovers that his grandmother is his mother's sister and her mother?

r61 😂

My mom found out her much older brother and sister had two different dads, neither of whom was my own mom's dad.

A granddaughter of one of the half-sibs was on a trashy reality show.

I doubt they were missionaries. That branch of the family wasn't particularly religious at all, even back then.

How would you know how religious an individual was a 100 years ago. And someone married into your "family." What do you know about that side?

can I use ancestry to find mormon boyz?

there was some story about a white housewife married to a white husband but she apparently had a thing for bbc, and had a few biracial kids that she gave away. eventually thru dna the half black siblings found each other (they had different fathers). they also found the woman's all white kids who knew nothing of their biracial half sibs, or that their ma was such a slut.

Like countless others, we were always told that we were "part Cherokee" which was a badge of honor and not entirely implausible because our ancestors moved into the area where they lived before Andrew Jackson stole the land and forced them to OK. My sister still insists it's true though it's probably bullshit. But I do wonder, how do they rule it out on DNA if the Cherokees and other native americans don't contribute dna samples.?

Well, you make some good points, R66.

Thirty years ago, when I was a middle schooler, my great aunt once told me that my G-G-grandpa was mean. She said he killed my G-G grandma by pushing her down the cellar stairs. She was very young when she died, just 26. Had several kids already and a baby no one still-living knew ever existed, nor does anyone know what happened to her. My great aunt didn't tell me about the baby but the baby is on the census I saw on Ancestry.

My parents said my great aunt was crazy, but they never talked to her. She lived by herself out in the country, down the road from my grandpa. I used to walk down to see her and ask her all the family history stuff. She never seemed crazy to me during those years. An old shut-in, maybe, an oddball, not unlike many of you, but everything she told me way back then has checked out thus far in my current endeavors-- the surnames and the few states in Germany everyone lived in before coming here. Why would everything else she said be true except for this?

R70=OP

[quote] But I do wonder, how do they rule it out on DNA if the Cherokees and other native americans don't contribute dna samples.?

It's not that they don't contribute any, but that there are fewer participants.

If I recall, Native American ancestry shares markers with Asian ancestry DNA, so if they don't see those markers, they determine there's no Native ancestry.

What's the best way to find Native American ancestry?

I tried ancestry.com. I thought I pretty much knew my genetic makeup but was curious if any native American DNA was still in the mix. One line of my mother's side is on the roles but she had other lines that are not.

I got my results and found out there was nationalities in my dna I knew nothing about. So I took a very interesting tour of history while doing my geneology.

My mom's family were spot on. I was told all my life she was English Irish Scot mostly with Cherokee and Seminole and one Creole ancestor back a ways. Exactly what I found.

My dad on the other hand... Lol I knew my grand dad came from society people. And he did. But also from a whole lot of ex slaves. My grandmother also had African ancestry.

I found out I am the 15th great grand daughter of Elizabeth Woodville as are thousands of people.

I found one ancestor from canada. I learned so much history thru him. I had never heard of the fille du roi.

My journey brought history to life. I think it was well worth the money. It was a lot of fun doing the research.

Sorry for boring old lady post. But since it's not a gay topic I hope you will forgive me.

Told ya...Blackstone Group Inc (BX.N) said on Wednesday it agreed to acquire genealogy provider Ancestry.com Inc from private equity rivals for $4.7 billion, including debt, placing a big bet on family-tree chasing as well as personalized medicine.

[quote] I found out I am the 15th great grand daughter of Elizabeth Woodville as are thousands of people.

That's maybe the thing I didn't realize - we all have four grandparents, eight grandparents etc. but my brain never wrapped itself around what that means upthread, that we have thousands of ancestors, and ergo they have many other descendants as well.

So that "we are all the same" shit actually has a smidge of truth to it.

R74 - Which Elizabeth Woodville? Because if you're talking about the wife of Edward IV, you'd be quite a bit farther away than great-great granddaughter.

Woodville died in 1492.

Is there another we should recognise instantly?

Well, my great-great-great-great grandpa was Johann Christian Claudius Devaranne.

R77 please reread. I said 15th great graddaughter. I assume like me your eyes may blur a bit when reading a long time. I can see how that would run together.

PEF Blackstone, headed by Trump's biggest financial backer, Stephen Schwartzman, just purchased Ancestry.com? That's an awful lot of personal information that is suddenly in the hands of the only person still supporting Donald Trump financially. Coincidence? Ancestry makes Cambridge Analytica look like a spreadsheet list from a local fundraiser.

Do you really want to give all you family info to an entity owed by an incredibly rich and malevolent trump owner?

Great. My test kit just arrived. I haven't activated it or even opened it. So hopefully, they haven't charged my credit card yet. But NO - they aren't getting my info now. Other than my name and address.

No gay should give any money to the Mormon church after Prop 8 - and a litany of other fucked up actions.

Plus - you realize that when they get your information, they're going to baptize you in absentia into the Mormon church, right?

Yes - they do this. They did it to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust for crying out loud.

Why anyone would give these freaks money is beyond me.

If someone, in his will, in 1727 described his son as "simple", does that mean the son was retarded?

Probably

Gee, I wonder what they'll do with ancestry.com's data?

[quote]Blackstone’s Motel 6 Owes 2,000 Guests for Giving Names to Immigration Officials

. . .

[quote]Motel 6 Operating LP agreed in June to pay as much as $10 million to resolve claims that some of its locations in Arizona and Washington state voluntarily shared information about guests -- particularly ones with Latino-sounding names or Mexican identification -- with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

rest of story at link

They are also a despicable company. They do not notify you about an upcoming charge and their cancellation process is deliberately elaborate. I cancelled after two months (forgetting about the upcoming second charge) and didn't keep an eye out for future charges thinking I was done with them. Caveat emptor with this group. Much of what they offer should be in the public domain anyway. I guess it is. The application is also very clunky and not intuitive at all.

R44, please do! I've been on Ancestry for a few years and while a little clunky, I'm happy it exists and hope the database lives forever and people can access it forever, because I've spent a shit-ton of time uploading photos and other documents related to my family. It's enabled me to feel okay tossing some stuff, because it's captured on Ancestry.

I've been debating doing a DNA test, because I have a grandfather that skipped out on his family when my parent was young, and I can't find anything about him on Ancestry. It's quite possible he starting going by a different name. It's always been a mystery that we'd like to solve. It's doubtful that what we learn would be comforting or healing or good news, because he was a cad and a bit of a drifter. But it might provide some closure.

So, I'd love to hear your comparison/review between the two!

R87 - Will do! Sorry for the late reply, by the by.

I wouldn't have bothered except for the nearly 500 regions they can tie DNA to now.

The trick is not to sign up for a membership for any of these places. You only need to pay for the DNA test once. You only need a membership if you want to use there database to contact and trace or find previously unknown relatives. So you don't run into cancellation problems (which are common to companies from Internet providers to pet food suppliers in my experience) if there's no membership.

By the way, the Blackstone Group purchased Ancestry, I think this summer - $4.7 billion deal.

They're a huge investment company, and my guess is they are interested in the health-related DNA info these places have.

They don't care where your ancestors are from, but people often use these companies to get information on their health prospects, and in the long run, I'd bet Blackstone is interested in health projections and their impact on employment, insurance, etc.

But here's their statement:

"Aug 5 (Reuters) - Blackstone Group Inc BX.N said on Wednesday it agreed to acquire genealogy provider Ancestry.com Inc from private equity rivals for $4.7 billion, including debt, placing a big bet on family-tree chasing as well as personalized medicine. [note the personalised medicine mention: in my view, that's where this dog is buried]

Ancestry.com is the world’s largest provider of DNA services, allowing customers to trace their genealogy and identify genetic health risks with tests sent to their home. [ta daaaaa]

Blackstone is hoping that more consumers staying at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic will turn to Ancestry.com for its services."

So my advice to all is to enjoy the DNA game of finding out where you came from, but not to take any of their health questionnaires or use them to get any genetic "health=related" questions answered they try to get you to use them for.

^*their (not there) database.

Well, as promised to poster upthread, I received my report from ancestry, to compare with the one I got from 23andme.

My recommendation is to go with 23andme. Ancestry's report was very fussy, visually less clear, too many things were left unclarified, but most of all, although they go to great lengths to explain how they do their calculations and talk about how many people in their database they compare with yours in the same tested populations . . .they absolutely refuse to give a baseline confidence level in their results.

Instead, they say provide in their Ethnicity Estimates a disclaimer below stating "but it could be as low as . . . as high as" and give a range so broad as to undermine trust in their product. If they can't state at least 50% confidence in their results, then they're taking your money for nothing.

They've covered their arses from here to Domesday with all the explanations, talking about how it isn't an exact science, and everything they do to check the results, but the ranges they give as possible under each "estimate" is so broad you might as well just throw the estimate out. You can get that level of information from your Granddad.

23andme guarantees a 50% level of confidence, and provides a tool to raise it to several other points so that you can see how the results would change (basically, the higher the confidence level goes, the broader the categories go). This is probably what ancestry is trying to do with its "but it could be . . . " but their ranges show differences far broader than the change in confidence level shown in 23ndme's tool to do so.

They're also lazy geographically. The Balkans are not Eastern Europe, for example - lumping Montenegro in with Russia is just plain lazy.

23andme reports were easier to read, their map wasn't so messy (anyone with half a brain can follow it, but still, the color blocks and charts on 23andme were better laid out), and in a few areas, notably my ancestry from the Iberian peninsula, the variance in percentage of ancestry was so significant that one or the others' "algorithm" needs adjusting. My guess, from family history, is that it's ancestry's.

So there you are. 23andme takes the bell here for baldly stating a specific level of confidence in its results. The only advantage of the ancestry report was mention of a good many more regions across Europe than 23andme. If you want to know if you've got 3% Irish DNA, go for it.

23andme for the win.

23% Greek, mixed in with the Italian side. None of us ever knew that.

There are two facets to genealogy/family trees. There’s the marriage part and the DNA part.

R90, thank you for the report! Greatly appreciate the insight.

R90 Thank you. I also tried 23andMe. 6,5% Spanish&Portuguese, 2% Italian, those two really surprised me. 54% North African and 20,2% western Asian. 23% European. 2,7% British/Irish I just don’t have any DNA outside of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia which surprised me too.

Does anyone know how accurate the “cousins” are???? I have one first cousin supposedly and many fourth and fifth cousins. We don’t share the same haplo groups.

How accurate are all those

And my maternal haplo group is a bit uncommon and goes back to the Ashkenazi Jewish Community. Never heard of that community? Nothing else Jewish turns up in the breakdown. Any relatives here on DL?😉

People expect the ethnicity results to match modern political boundaries, but these markers are from migrations that occurred hundreds or thousands of years ago. They don’t do a good job explaining this to the consumer who have a different expectation. Your ancestors may be from Ireland but their dna may be Scandinavian or English for example. I find that far more interesting tbh. I did a test around 7 years ago, then they sent me an update based on new data within the last year which is significantly different.

Too bad there don't seem to be any companies that don't sell your data to universities, turn it over to law enforcement or leave it open for distant relatives to find you. None of these three things interest me

R96 thanks for explaining this. I also didn’t really understand the “broad Northern European DNA”. I mean one would think it wouldn’t be so hard to match with today’s people from that area? I’m curious to see updates too in the future and part of me wonders if the results would be very different if I’d do another test at a different company

R97 if 23andMe would do so they would have many lawsuits by now

23andme has a consenting process for whether or not you want your data used for medical research. You can opt in or out.

R95 Ashkenazi Jews are most European Jews and the only Jewish group 23andme tracks. My Heritage has the other Jewish ethnic groups. You can download the raw data and can re-run there for free.

Thanks very much R100 I’ll give it a try.

I never put any of my genealogy data on line. I keep it on my lap top and back it up locally. I don't trust Ancestry.com or other on-line storage. i use them for getting information but not for storage.

R97, every bit of information about you, right down to your social security number and your medical records, can be handed over to law enforcement if a judge signs a subpoena to do so. Do not kid yourself about this. NO piece of information about you in under your exclusive control except for your most private thoughts which you have never shared with anyone. Ever.

The bottom line is that these companies, even the top-tier ones, are pushing an inexact science as something you can really rely on. Well, you can, but only to a limited extent. They are, in the final analysis, basing their "algorithms" on the population in their databases, which they proclaim to provide enough of a comparison base to new entrants to make their projections. The fact that they change those reports periodically should tell users that what they're getting is likely only a decent guess at where their ancestors came from, not "who you are".

They're exploiting, in an increasingly fluid cultural environment in which a sense of identity used to be clearer, a human craving for knowing who they are, for identity, for something to cling to.

But with the advent of increasing secularism and multiculturalism, for better or worse, things that used to give people their sense of belonging, doesn't any longer, and I really do believe humans are tribal at heart and will go to any lengths available to feel tribal.

23andme, I suspect, does a better job of projection not least because it does mtDNA testing (mitochondrial DNA, which you only inherit from the maternal side), which Andestry does not. They both use autosomal techniques, but 23andme also carried out mtDNA testing.

Therefore, Ancestry's "estimates" are less presciide, and they simply will not nail some level of confidence to the mast in their results, except through those broad ranges, which often looks absurd to laymen.

So, for as much as it's worth, and it's not worth that much, I do think 23andme is better at DNA, while Ancestry is more focussed on broad ethnic ancestry and genealogy.

Lastly, many people misinterpret what those percentages mean. Getting a result from 23andme that shows, say, 12.5% Turkish DNA, does NOT mean you ARE 12.5% Turkish. It only means that in the DNA sample you provided, that was long enough for them to measure and compare with your other strands, 12/5% reflected Turkish origin.

It's a difference that escapes many users of this service, because they want to know what they ARE. No one, anywhere, can tell you with any integrity that YOU ARE this percent of anything, unless all your ancestors for the last 200 years came from County Mayo or something like that. If they tell you that they detected 85% Irish DNA in your test, yes, you likely ARE a huge percentage Irish - only you already knew that, so why pay for it?!

And the reason 23andme can drill down to fractional percentages is because they test mtDNA, so their DNA analysis tools at this point are sharper than Ancestry's.

But hardly infallible. This is still not an exact science.

R104, if people choose to "rely" on these stated estimations about one's genetic ancestry, that's their problem. The fault lies with them. Not the companies doing the straight forward testing. Imagine if they reported back only the actual results. It would be a long page of abbreviations and digits and plusses and minuses and > and < that no one in the general public could begin to understand. All the rest is just an attempt by these companies to help the untutored interpret the test results. And, of course, that explanation will change as the science matures. That's the same for any interpretation coming from any branch of science.

I chose Ancestry to do the DNA testing because it integrated well with the genealogical research I had been doing there. I tested the DNA after several years of researching and building an extensive family tree. I built the tree for reasons of my own which I thought through in advance. Happily for me, the DNA testing confirmed, generally, that the research I had done was at least on the right track. The test results and the research aligned comfortably. So, for me, the testing was a success. There are things I don't like about Ancestry, but it's all about software glitches and dead ends that one will never encounter, unless one tries to do research there.

If someone wants to do the DNA testing, and put no effort, at all, into any other aspect of this work, they might do better to drop the same money with an astrologer or a palm reader.

I belong to several DNA-related groups on Facebook.

(Side note: if stupid people annoy you, by all means, do not join a DNA-related Facebook group. The level of ignorance and stupidity is stunning. Example: "These results say Native American and Iberian. How can I be that? I'm Mexican!!!)

Far and away, the two most common questions that people pop up to ask are:

1. WHERE IS MY NATIVE AMERICAN DNA???? MY GREAT-GREAT GRANDMOTHER WAS A CHEROKEE PRINCESS!!!!! WE HAVE PHOTOS, AND SHE HAS DARK HAIR, DARK EYES, AND HIGH CHEEKBONES!!!! THERE MUST BE SOMETHING WRONG WITH THIS DAMN TEST!!!!!

(answer: like 98% of white Americans who like to claim Indian ancestry, you were lied to)

and

2. HOW COME I DON'T MATCH WITH MY FATHER, OR ANYBODY ON HIS SIDE OF THE FAMILY??? THEY MUST HAVE MIXED UP MY RESULTS WITH SOMEBODY ELSE'S!!!!!!

(answer: Mommy was a slut, and a liar).

Not a day goes by in these groups that several people don't show up asking these 2 questions. It's pretty funny.

We were told we had Cherokee blood. It turns out it was actually Sub Saharan. I wanted to get a voodoo doll of Trump when I discovered it was the part of Africa where voodoo originated. Just paying homage to my heritage.

Poster upthread, you are more or less agreeing with me. For those whose primary interest is genealogical, Ancestry's DNA is an ancillary, not a primary tool. It works fine for that.

But the fact remains that 23andme is primarily focussed on DNA, and it has superior tools for that, including mtDNA. For people not that interested in genealogy, but more interested in where they got their DNA from, 23andme is a better choice.

I began doing genealogy research in the late 90s, a couple of years after my parents died and they left me the genealogy notes they'd made. This was right around the time when the Internet came into public existence, and so it was really exciting to be able to search for people. Fortunately I connected with a third cousin who was an excellent researcher (Masters in Library Science), and her guidance was very helpful.

I bought the program called Family Tree Maker which was very insidious because it would prompt you to upload your data to their site whenever you had entered X number of people in your tree. Then it would take that data and dump it onto CDs which it would then sell. They would not vet the data first, just dumped it onto the CD. The only thing they did was to make an index of all the names, so that you could search on a name and it would tell you which CD to buy. They released hundreds of those CDs which did terrible damage to the genealogy community because it spread so much bad data. The Mormon church also owned the company that made FTM. I really hated when they abandoned FTM a couple of years ago because I had done massive amounts of research a decade earlier that I had entered into FTM, and since it was a proprietary format, it was not possible to extract it now. (I did since find a program that does it, but now I'm worried that that program will also soon be abandoned.)

One good thing about the Mormon Church back then, though, was that they had genealogy centers in their temples which were open to non-Mormons. You could do research there, and order microfilms from Salt Lake City. The data they had access to was vast, because they had spent the last 50 years microfilming everything they could get their hands on, in order to be able to accumulate enough data to baptize millions of people into their church. I spent several years using their research facilities, and it was wonderful, and the people who volunteered there were helpful and knowledgeable.

Then they created Ancestry.com and digitized stuff (very little, in comparison to what they have access to), and closed up the Family Research Centers.

I had the DNA done a few years ago, and got some fairly detailed information, and then a couple of years later they announced that they had 'adjusted their algorithm', and now suddenly I was just a honky descended from English people. After having gone through the whole family myth about Cherokee ancestors, and then finding out I actually have zero Indian DNA.

r106 made me laugh. There are people who are pretty ignorant of history who don't know why they have Scandinavian blood when they're Irish or Greek blood when they're Italian.

And then you get into all the drama with paternity. People who have to sit down and have a big talk with mom about who their bio father really was.

I used Ancestry to find a long lost relative we couldn’t find for years. The only first name we had for him seemed like it must be a nickname, but it turns out it wasn’t, it was his actual name. Found him by his military records.

They have access to military records, which is really helpful if you don’t know much about the person. We didn’t know his home state or the name of his relatives, and we still found him. After we got the names and relatives’ names, we were able to find his living family. We were also able to see a picture of him, which we’d never seen before.

I was a Census enumerator as a job one summer while in college. My job was to go to houses with people who didn’t complete their long forms, the ones that asked really detailed info on people’s ethnicity. I was assigned to a mostly rural area of Butler County, Ohio that continued lots of trailer parks and barking dogs. Anyway, when asked about ethnic background, people would rattle off the usual for that area: German, Irish, Scottish, etc, then surprizingly often they’d throw on ‘ and Cherokee’ at the end of the list. I’d ask if they are a registered member of any tribe, and they’d stutter and say responses like ‘my grandfather had high cheekbones’ or ‘everyone in my family says so’. This was called the ‘Wannabe Tribe’ by other workers. It’s almost always Cherokee too across the country even if it makes no geographic sense because that’s one of the few tribes most people can name. It really messes with the Census because it requires extra auditing. I often wonder now how many family legends lie in tatters due to the DNA testing. By the way, I can’t imagine how dangerous this job is now given all the gun-toting government haters out there, It should have hazard pay.

R112 - The other issue with the Cherokee identification is that the Cherokee have one of the lowest requirements of blood percentage for membership. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians a minimum of 1/16 degree of Cherokee blood for tribal enrollment, By contrast, the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Higher Education Grant requires a minimum of 25% Native American blood to qualify for that kind of grant.

It's hardly surprising that it was easy to claim some sort of tie with the Cherokee.

It would be much harder to claim, say, membership in the Zuni Pueblo people, or the Cheyenne.

OP here. My analysis came back yesterday. It says that I'm 21% Scottish, but when it compares my parents' results next to mine, neither of my parents have anywhere near 21% Scottish (I do have about 50/50 DNA from each parent, so it was no funny business), nor has being Scottish ever been a know -of or spoken-about thing.

My parents are mostly Russian-German and German-German. And Scandinavian with just a sprinkling of French, (which was sprinkled by the Huguenot, Johann Claudius Christian Devaranne who was executed).

Where the fuck is Ancestry getting this 21% Scottish bullshit?

R114 could it be British and Irish too? Maybe they simply call it Scottish at Ancestry? I only have experience with 23andMe

R45 Cherokees do not donate their DNA for ancestry tests. Elizabeth Warren's DNA was tested against South American indigenous people and that's why it was so off. I believe she is Cherokee.

My mother grew up in Oklahoma. Her father was an orphan from Indian Territory (Arkansas). We know his dad was Black Irish and believe his mother was Cherokee.

Cyndi's List is a useful site.

R114 I am confused. Are you saying that you have a percentage Scottish that is higher than either of your parents, but not higher than their combined number? Or are you saying that it is higher than their combined percentages? The first is unlikely, but possible, like getting a straight flush in poker. The latter shouldn’t happen.

R114 The ethnicity estimates are basically the equivalent of astrology. It's the parlor trick portion of the service. The estimates are accurate at the continent level; they are able to tell the difference between African and Asian and European and American DNA. They are also pretty accurate at narrowing down broad regions within the continents (i.e. South Europe vs. Scandinavia, North Africa vs. Sub-Saharan, etc.). But they can be off when it comes to telling, say, Italian vs. Greek, or, in your case, Scottish vs. German.

R116 Nonsense. The science is definitely able to determine Native American DNA vs. European. It doesn't claim to be able to narrow it down to a specific tribal population. Warren's DNA proved to be almost entirely European. She's a white broad who MAY have had ONE Native American ancestor CENTURIES ago.

I've had friends whose ancestry results came back as both Italian and Greek.

R114 - This is a common misconception that both 23andme and Ancestry have trouble explaining to clients.

Your results don't mean you are 21% Scottish. No one at this point can make any such determination with any such accuracy.

What it means is this: they compared your strands of DNA, the ones long enough to be measured, against those of Scottish ancestry currently in their database, and found that among those strands that could be measured, 21% of your chromosomes matched those other strands.

This is a fine but important difference. Their findings are limited by the other samples of DNA in their database and how much of your DNA was "readable".

They can pretty much accurately pinpoint regions where your DNA is found - they're telling you more or less where your DNA comes from.

What they cannot tell you is that what they were able to measure makes you 21% Scottish for sure. It is an inexact science, still.

Hope this helps.

Why is it so hard to understand that mankind existed long before the grandparents of anyone living today? And that there were migrations all throughout history?

I learned some family secrets when I showed my parents my DNA test results. There were ethnic groups in there no one wanted to talk about, but the DNA was proof they were there. It all made sense after I asked many questions and found information online. I could confirm all of it.

Ancestry.com is fine. They are responsive and helpful and do not intrude with the Mormon connection except with some of the data categories that one can, if one wishes, use. If this OP from over a month ago was too lazy to ask for assistance, the problem is on her.

I don't use the mobile app. Too much information on a page.

It's not hard at all to use. It's just hard to incorporate other data en masse. It goes in bit by bit.

The fact is, however, that Mormons are notoriously sloppy about their own genealogical work connected to sealings and all, so it is best not to use or trust unsourced and undocumented family-tree info for your own genealogies, from this or any site. People make things up, ignore what century they're dealing with, and the rest. Of course that's everyone today - lazy and not interested in getting things right. I have an ancestor for whom a Mormon gentleman entered info with no source two decades ago - connecting the line to a famous Scottish line of historical figures. And this crap data, with all the pompous pride that goes with it, is now taken for granted and appears in at least 1,000 published trees on every database there is.

Also, you have to be careful with "hints" and info suggested from other people's trees. It would seem like this would be helpful, but with the bad data people make up or misuse and the enormous number of genealogies there, you can easily end up with thousands of "helpful hints." Their actual collection of historical sources - extending to many obscure local sources, European parishes and congregations, odd international censuses, and a tremendous amount of US data make ancestry my preferred site. You just have to do your work.

I've done DNA tests from five different sources (research project) and didn't find Ancestry to be tardy in its responses. The genetic data easily blend with the family tree info, and the info received on relatives with DNA tested and/or on the site is great. A source such as ftDNA (Family Tree DNA) offers more options, at a cost, and a fine group of family/surname researches who volunteer to help, but it's more for the DNA side, without a family tree connection.

Through the routine Ancestry DNA test, my partner was located by twin half-sisters he didn't know he had, and that was wonderful for him. They had found another half-sister of theirs through it, too. (Mama was a mess and got pregnant twice after being widowed at 21, and my partner's father was a run-around bastard.) I've connected with many more-distant cousins, including several in various European countries, to whom I'm now very close.

There. That's all I know about it. Except "why." I guess it's mainly to have a sense of context, for answering family questions, and for seeing myself and close family as part of the story of the USA and elsewhere.

My known relatives are mostly a pain in the ass, I don't think I'd want to find any more relatives I don't know about.

Thank you R118, R119, & R121.

Today after reading your posts I went back to the Ancestry DNA app to review the findings while taking your replies under consideration. The part where it compares my DNA against my mom's, and my DNA against my dad's--those percentages have now completely changed for all three of us.

I thought I must have been mistaken, but then I remembered that I took screenshots of the comparisons the other day to send my parents and I was able to find those on my phone and look at those next to the results they posted just the other day, and they're moderately different alright.

Sorry, my parents' numbers have changed, but mine didn't. Still not enough Scottish to add up to 21%.

💸💸💸

OP-You have to get over this expectation of numerical fractions adding up. You get half your chromosomes from each parent. Each one could have passed on to you a portion of Scottish ancestry that emerged more in your DNA than it did in either of theirs, and more of their Scottish DNA than anything else they had.

Let's say your Mum was 10% Scots and the rest a mixture of French, German, Swiss, Italian, English, and Norwegian, and your Dad was 10% Scots and a mixture French, Irish, Swedish, Welsh, English, and German.

Each one passed on all of their Scottish DNA to you and much less of the other strands, or something of the other stands in much lower quantities. You'd be up to 20% right there.

This isn't a simple paint by numbers exercise. In people with less than 100% anything, which means most of us, it's a crapshoot at the time of conception which bits Mum and Dad pass on.

That's why siblings can have such different DNA reports. Sibling One got all the Scottish DNA; Sibling Two got little Scottish DNA but lots more French and German; Sibling Three came out evenly dispersed amongst Scottish, Welsh, and German DNA.

You can't expect this stuff to add up like a grocery bill, first because that's not the way DNA works, and, second, because what these companies are doing is selling something that is still more art than science right now.

R109

[quote] ...closed up the Family Research Centers.

I don't think so.

Here's a list of centers in the US, state by state.

You can't rely on exact percentages. Instead of exactly 25% of an ethnicity, it could fit somewhere from 20 to 30%. I am 22% Baltic. My grandfather was from Latvia. He is the only link to the Baltics I have. So, I missed out on 3% of his DNA in the spit sample I submitted in that very moment. Another spit sample of my DNA might show I am 27% Baltic. You can't assume you have fixed percentages in each strand of your DNA. If I spit twenty different samples, my DNA might average out to be 25% Baltic.

Your Scottish ancestry may be deeper and more distant than you expected. You might not know the migrations your ancestors took through time. Finns moved to Sweden and Denmark to the Shetland Islands to Scotland to Ireland to America. You can spend more time delving into official birth and death records, church records, places of burial. It may light a candle, as my research did for me. I found I was 6% Czech in my DNA. If you divide 100% into 16 equal parts, each part is 6.25% of your DNA. I probably had a great-great-grandparent who presented me with Czech DNA, and it fought its way into my spit sample. Not in my wildest dreams would I expect that. I try to keep an open mind that I will gain clarity the deeper I search. I don't have final answers. I never will.

R130 the reason you show 22% Baltic instead of 25% isn't because you spit different amounts of different DNA every time you spit.

The only people we inherit exact percentages of DNA from are our parents: 50% from each.

Beyond that, when you get to the grandparent level, it usually varies a bit: 22% from one, 28% from another, 24% from another, and 26% from another, just as an example of how it might be in your case.

At the great-grandparent level, it varies slightly more, and at the great-great GP level, even more. What happens is, as new DNA is introduced into the pool that's eventually going to create you, some of the older DNA gets dropped from the pool to make room for the new DNA, and this happens fairly randomly. This is why you will have a small percentage of 3rd cousins with whom you share no DNA, and you will share DNA with only about 50% of your 4th cousins. It doesn't mean you're not genetically related to them, it just means they inherited completely different strands of DNA from the same common ancestors.

This is all fascinating to me. Obviously, I don't know as much about how this works as I thought I did.

I sincerely appreciate all of your patient replies.

I wonder how many families and relationships ancestry.com has ruined with all womanizing husbands and slutty housewives being exposed for having other kids or the kids finding out they have other dads.

r133 I've heard stories about people who got their DNA results back and it was obvious that their paternity was not what they thought it was.

I have a friend who found out she has another sister. Her father had an affair and the girl tracked him down. My friend's mother was devastated and divorced him. The dad didn't really want anything to do with the girl. Another found out his father wasn't his actual father His mother had an affair. She was widowed but it's definitely strained his relationship with his mother. I'll live blissfully ignorant and never go on that site.

I've been meaning to do Ancestry and I look enough like both of my parents to know I won't have any surprises.

Lots of comments, but I'll keep it to a few.

- Someone I know found out a few years ago when he was around 35 that his father was not his father, his mother had been artificially inseminated back in the day by her dr., who is long dead. (She didn't tell her husband.) His wife urged him to find out about his background for health reasons in case he inherited a major disease/disorder. So he sent off stuff to 23andme and found his father, who had been a college student and selling sperm samples. He had a reunion with the donor and at least 5 or 6 other sperm brothers (a sister has yet to pop up) that he found via the 23andme test. The donor was delighted; they all found out they were very, very similar temperaments and interests....they are all artistic, like the donor and very intelligent. He wonders how many other siblings he has because the donor sold his samples many times back in the 70s.

- My mother was a long-time geneaologist who did it all before the advent of computers. She was lucky to live near the 2nd biggest geneaology library after Salt Lake. She ran into a few roadblocks on only a couple family lines; otherwise she had researched out all of her and Dad's lines back as far as she could (always back to the country of origin and sometimes further). She HATED Family Tree Maker, but she was very helpful to other researchers and always shared family info to others who were looking. In the early days of the Internet when we all searched our names to see what would pop up, my mother's did more than anyone else's because so many people attributed her family line research to their information.

- My cousin on my mother's side has all of my mother's research. His mother (not my blood relative) always said that they had Native American blood. (I can't remember which tribe, but they were from OK). The Nat'l Geo test DNA confirmed this as well as corresponded with the research on our side of the family.

- My mother was always looking for the black sheep and never found one. I think she was a little disappointed....she said we were all respectable.

R137 That is a commentary on our present society when respectable people want to be 'naughty' or 'hip' or disreputable.

My father was adopted and he always hoped he was descended from Vikings. Turns out all roads lead to Dorset, England and he is the descendant of shop keepers and fishermen. Which makes a lot of sense, but not quite the swashbuckling he was hoping for.

R133 - LOL. Probably the most common denominator in all our respective packages of saliva is, somewhere along the line, infidelity.

Hence, the obsession of men over time immemorial on keeping a close watch on their women and on the veracity of heritage lines.

Ancestry.com can find interesting data like voter records from the turn of last century but it also has a lot of errors.

For instance, it had one of my great-uncles married to both his wife and her sister. This is not true as I knew the sister's actual husband here

There were also misspellings/confusions of European names that led to people being listed twice under two different spellings or families being listed separately because it had one side coming from "Rome" and the other from "Roma"

There didn't seem to be an easy way to point out the errors either.

I sent off my saliva to 23 and Me several years ago, and I've been puzzled by the algorithm changes too. My first report showed 9% Scandinavian which puzzled me since family lore had none of that. Then in researching family trees on Ancestry and others, I discovered a good deal of Irish, Scots and Northern English immigration. Must be the blood of those Vikings.... The latest algorithm has .4% Scandinavian per se, but some 14% Broadly Northwest European

The latest algorithm is showing me with 4.7% North African/Western Asian genes (with the emphasis on Iranian/Mesopotamian) . This too has me puzzled. The closest I can find in family trees is one Sicilian 5 generations back.

R128 is correct. The mix is a crapshoot. The only way to have identical DNA to a sibling is if you were identical twins.

R139 - As there is a large amount of Viking DNA in the British Isles, particularly along the coastlines where Dorset is and where the Viking arrived to pillage, rape, and often settle down, your father may indeed have "Viking" blood. But it wouldn't appear as such: it would appear as "Scandinavian" blood, i.e., slivers of Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish blood. Or, it may have simply been overcome later on by Saxon, Celtic, and Norman DNA.

The Northern Isles at one time had more Viking DNA than "British" DNA and they feel a closer kinship to their Viking ancestors than most other Brits do. Today, it stands at about 20% that is actually traceable to Norway, which is where most of the Isles Viking DNA is from.

" . . . In the years that followed, villages near the sea, monasteries and even cities found themselves besieged by these sea-based foreign intruders. Soon no region of the British Isles (Britain and nearby islands) was safe from the Vikings. They attacked villages and towns in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man and England.

By 866 the Vikings had arrived in York. They made York (or Jorvik as they called it) the second biggest city in the country after London.

No matter how many times the Vikings were beaten, they always came back, and in the end all their efforts paid off. It was the Vikings (Norsemen) of Normandy who finally conquered England in 1066 and changed British history for ever."

So there you go. If your Dad's DNA report showed not a single measurable chromosome of Scandinavian DNA, well there you are. I'd be curious as to how it defined him.

And there's no shame in being descended from the sturdy fisherfolk and shopkeepers of Dorset: it is these that were the backbone of England for so long.

Tell him that :).

R139 - P.S. You might also remind your Da who got the British Expeditionary Force off the beaches of Dunkirk, snatching survival out of almost certain early defeat by the Third Reich . . .

First recorded raid on Dorset by the Vikings occurred in the eighth century, as that came up.

Thanks R144/R145! He’s a 100% bulls eye on Southern England on Ancestry with 100% participation in the English settlers of Newfoundland. And that was where he was knit.

I always assumed he was Irish. I was wrong too.

He has a huge Bio, many of them kind generous people.

I can't say. I don't have experience with any of these companies. And I never will.

I was adopted and interested in the DNA not necessarily the genealogy. I’m ok with the results I just don’t understand the 3rd cousins or even 1st ones. How do they determine that?

[quote] The only way to have identical DNA to a sibling is if you were identical twins.

There are videos on Youtube of DNA testing of identicals - the case I remember was triplets. Their DNA results were NOT identical. Close, but different percentages.

[quote] There didn't seem to be an easy way to point out the errors either.

On Ancestry.com, you will find a link on the page which provides the result of a particular record. The link, along the left side of the screen under the box showing the small picture of the image, shows a small pencil icon with the phrase

[quote] Add or update information.

Click on this link and you are able to make corrections to a record. After you enter the correction to, for example, a misspelled name, subsequent searchers will find the corrected record added to their search results.

I frequently correct such errors. Helps researchers coming after you to bypass the problems with finding names that have been misspelled or other incorrect information.

The recent update on Ancestry assigned tons of Scottish ancestry to tons of people.

Before, I believe they had England, Scotland and Wales all lumped together as one. With this latest update, they broke out Scotland into its own region.

The Facebook DNA groups I belong to are all up in arms over it. It's all they've been talking about for the past day or two.

Ancestry.com put me in touch with a 2nd cousin (a grandchild of a grandparent's sibling) who had been adopted as an infant. He did the DNA test at Ancestry and I was in the category of his closest relatives participating at Ancestry. He contacted me and shared what little information he had about his birth mother. I happily shared every bit of information I had and it helped him work out what he had long needed to know. He was put up for adoption by the daughter of my grandfather's brother. The DNA results have not been life changing for me, but I'm glad I could help this man with some information that was surely life changing for him. I only regret not having something more exciting than this boring family to offer him.

R57

It is Bouquet.

Please and thank you.

By the way, you do NOT change your DNA from day to day and "spit to spit". The way it is measured, extracted, and tested may differ from one laboratory to another, but the DNA you spit out will be the SAME each time.

Also, I believe that 23andme's testing laboratory is LabCorp, one of the two huge testing "giants" (the other is Quest). All 23andme's work is done, I believe, by LabCorp.

Probably tmi for everyone else, but R144 in case you are interested, one of the families we discovered he is descended from is the Colbourne family of Sturminster Newton. (Colbourne was originally de Colbere we think so Norman)

He always hoped he might discover who his birth mother was. Ancestry allowed him to find both sides and oddly enough there are/were significant genealogical records so the histories can be traced back hundreds of years.

I believe someone mentioned you can download your raw data from 23andMe but I can’t seem to find it. Sorry maybe someone can explain where to find this option and where to upload it to ancestry?

I mean where to upload it to MyHeritage 🤦‍♂️

Mormon, Mormon, Mormon that place is owned by Mormons. You know the same ones that got sued when it was discovered they were using all that information to look up people who had not been baptized and do it for them even if they were another religion or dead. Yeah, that place.

Use 23 and Me if you want DNA stuff. Found many relatives that way surprisingly. Inducing an unknown half brother who is just figuring out his mother was a whore.