DNA and Me

The story of me taking DNA tests and the results

To give you a bit of background if this is your first time on the site or you have never met me, I have been involved in the obsession hobby of tracing my families roots, on and off for the last 20 years or so, starting around about when I turned 40. I say on and off as I stopped completely about 10 years ago due to an "incident" involving my wife and a household lamp. If you're having difficulty sleeping you can read about it here but suffice to say that after telling her to leave the lamp alone, which had a dimmer switch as part of it's mechanism, she didn't, she switched it on and it blew the main house fuse but before it did it fried my computer and I lost everything. Not recoverable. I gave up both talking to my wife and genealogy. Since our 30th wedding anniversary is this year, you can tell I did start talking talk to her again, after about 2 months, but it took me a lot longer to start with my genealogy again, probably about 5 years. I had lost in the region of 1000 people's full data and hundreds of photographs. Anyway, I digress..............

When I first started this long, unending quest things were nowhere near as easy as they are now. Information was easier to get than it had been but it still wasn't easy as it is today. For sure it wasn't as difficult as it had been for say my father's uncle, who was the madman of his generation, the genealogist of the family. He had to actually come out his house and visit places. Wow!!! As far as I know he went to Ireland and actually went to churches and looked at real records. Imagine!!! Not only the finding of the information has got easier, but the collation and recording of it has too. I remember when I first started, I used to have to write things down, actually using a bit of paper and one of those medievel things, I think they call it a pencil. The programs we have today make life so much easier for us. Not only do they record what we find, they tell us what we still need to find with the click of a button. If it wasn't for all these programs being able to tell me, there's no way I'd be able to figure out to what degree I'm related to people. No way!! Even in the 20 years that I have been doing it, the genealogical landscape has changed drastically. When I came back from my "break", DNA was on the scene!

Now DNA wasn't in itself new to me. I did Higher Biology and understood it to the extent of a Secondary School student. I dealt with it in a professional capacity for many years though. As a police officer I think that it first came to prominence in my professional life probably in the mid 1990's, I can remember taking the first samples and how new and exciting it all was. The main thing then was it was that it was in it's infancy, but the major thing was that it was expensive to get results and the samples had to be quite large (in comparison to now). Fast forward 20 odd years and we can spit in a small container and within a couple of weeks we have our DNA results back and there's all sorts of people getting matched with us just at the click of a button. Not only are documents telling us they are our relatives, we have irreputable evidence that they are (or not as some cases have found)!!

My first foray into the genealogical DNA world was with Ancestry. I had no real clue what was the best and worst company to go to to get this service. I had (and still have) an account with Ancestry (despite my growing skepticism about their pricing and who and what they stand for but that's for another post) and it's the most advertised so I went with that one. The process went very smoothly and after a few weeks I got my results through. I eagerly awaited my matches, and they started to roll in. Very quickly the number built up quickly and didn't really slow down. At present I have about 38,000 matches on Ancestry. That's a hell of a lot (but about average I think). I have only managed to plough through about 100 of them so far and confirmed them and managed to get them on my tree. I have so many other things to do with my genealogy that I've just never concentrated on it. I really should. That's probably my first point, the numbers in DNA are really overwhelming. It's a fantastic tool for both finding your family AND being able to tell people that they are "barking up the wrong tree" and they are not related. I like that part.

One part I find super frustrating, as an interested genealogist, is there are alot of folk that seem to not really be interested. You try to contact them but they never get back to you. I suspect many of them did it either because they got it as a present as a stocking filler at Christmas or a birthday or they got it and didn't realise there'd be quite a bit of work in it to interpret the data. Also I think many fell for the advertising bit where they talk about telling you where in the world your DNA comes from. Well after you've seen that it's kind of all over I suppose. That'll not change. A problem with that part is it's not super accurate. As far as I am aware it very much depends on the companies sample sizes AND where they choose to take the DNA sample from. I know I have connections with India. A 5x or 6x ago grandparent was in the British Army stationed in India. He married an Indian girl. On Ancestry it put me as having connections to South China. To be fair they are only out about 2000 miles. I see from looking at it today, it's changed to Hong Kong. Creeping closer but not quite right yet. Other companies I have done DNA with have it right as India AND the right part of India. That would be the second point I'd make, that they don't tell you about the innaccuracies of that part. Not good for sales I don't suppose.

Next I'd like to discuss something that they certainly don't market. That is the fact that after you have your sample and it has been processed, you can download your results and upload them to other sites. In other words, you don't need to take all the tests for all of the different companies. You can upload your results to other companies and they will start giving you matches on their database. This is defintely a way to save money but there's one caveat to that, I believe, as I stated before, that different companies may check different parts of your DNA so may get different results, especially as discussed, in their connections part. As I say at least two companies got it right that I have connections to India. It's obviously up to you where you go if you are considering doing a DNA test. I'm sure I read Ancestry has the biggest database, accounting for over half the martket. In other words they have more than the rest put together. Having a bigger database is definitely a big consideration. The bigger the database, the more chance of a match.

Another thing to consider is what kind of DNA test you want, there are different types of DNA they can test. Yes you heard that right. I thought DNA was just DNA. Well apparently not. There's Autosomal DNA, referred to a "Family DNA" in some places. This is the DNA that companies like Ancestry use and you get results from both your mother and father's sides. There's mtDNA which is DNA that your mother passes down to you and only your mother. This means that you can trace back your maternal line back through your mother, your mother's mother, your mother's mother's mother etc., you get the idea. Mother's pass this DNA down to both their daughters and their sons. There's also Y-DNA. This is passed down from father's to sons. The father does not pass this DNA to their daughters. So males can trace their paternal DNA back and back. The results from this are staggering and they can give very close estimations of where that Y-DNA came from originally and how it got to where you are now. Totally mind blowing. My main problem with this though is that I have so much information. I have so much information I haven't a clue what it means. You really do need a degree in genetics to figure out what is going on. I don't but luckily when I did the tests I came up with a match who I contacted. They were in Australia and they got back to me. Her husband is a PhD in the field of genetics!! RESULT!! He started to explain some of it to me but I got lost. Haven't heard from him in a while, hope he's okay as he was ill last time we spoke.

I have had all the tests done that I mention above. One of the huge drawbacks to this testing is it is quite expensive. Whilst there are different levels that you can test the DNA to, obviously I went for the top ones which does all of the tests. The company I went with are called FamilyTree DNA. The full Y-DNA test costs $450. A full mtDNA test costs $160 and the full Family DNA costs $80. If you are interested get on their mailing list as they do some good sales from at different times of the year like Mother's Day. Another problem that brings is there's MORE people matching you. Yes there will be some overlaps but most people only use one company. I have just under 6000 more matches on the Autosomal on this site, nearly 6500 Y-DNA matches, but quite curiously no MtDNA matches at all. I do completely understand that this is an expensive business but I would encourage anybody to do these tests. A small drawback is due to the expense, their database will be much smaller than Ancestrty's but this is, for me, the present "Rolls Royce" of testing. Very professional and doing it for more reasons than profit.

In conclusion, have I enjoyed my trip down DNA lane? Yes absolutely. It has come up with many many more leads and surprises. Problem is as I've said before, it's created enough work for 5 genealogy lifetimes, alone. Will I get through it all, most defintely not, but I'm sure I'll get many more gems on the way and many more leads to go down rabbit holes with. I did get my wife and my father to do test too. My wife obvioulsy because she is a different family line, but my father too as he could get some hits on family that he is closer to DNA wise that I wouldn't get. Sometimes the people are just too far out to get a hit. I reckon it starts to get dodgy about 4th cousin.

Which company would I chose, knowing what I know now? Well I'd probably definitely choose Family DNA but I'd probably still do an Ancestry test just because they have the biggest database. I would think there may come a time when you can't upload you results to other sites, so as to encourage people to do their tests, but they may not becuase if you have a DNA result on their site it might encourage you to buy their packages. That's for these companies to work out, not me. Anyway, I really shouldn't be spending time writing pages like this, as as I've already mentioned, including all the other sites I have well over 30,000 DNA hits to track down.

Take care and good luck if you choose do go down the DNA route. Don't hesitate to drop me an email if I can help you with anything. If I can't I'll hopefully know someone who can.