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General => Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing => Topic started by: rebekahm28 on Saturday 24 August 13 21:22 BST (UK)
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I'm female, is it possible to find out about my fathers mothers side? And also, my mothers fathers side. Thanks.
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What do you want to find out?
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Anything that I can get. On fathers mothers side; and also mothers fathers side. Probably two separate tests. I'm interested in knowing which country my ancestors came from on both sides, primarily.
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I would be interested in this as well.
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I'm interested in knowing which country my ancestors came from on both sides, primarily.
Unfortunately there is no such thing as Country specific DNA (although of course we all come from Africa originally). As time goes by our DNA mutates and this enables us to separate different "branches" of recent human evolution. These branches further divide into smaller and smaller branches with fewer and fewer people in them. The branches are associated with specific regions/countries, although it is an ongoing process in working out what they are
Paternal DNA mutates much faster than maternal DNA and so gives a much better picture of our ancestors movements, so a Y-DNA test is likely to yield much more information than an mtDNA test.
Is this of interest to you?
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I'm interested in knowing which country my ancestors came from on both sides, primarily.
regions/ so a Y-DNA test is likely to yield much more information than an mtDNA test.
Is this of interest to you?
The original poster is female, unless she has a brother who will take a YDNA test she will not be able to test for YDNA. Nor will YDNA be of use for her fathers mothers line.
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or paternal uncle, or paternal male cousin, etc, etc.
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Sorry for delay in replying, been away. Yes Im female but unfortunately nobody else in the family will take it. Would it count if my son did the test? Its my side Im interested in though, not his fathers side. Thankyou.
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Sorry for delay in replying, been away. Yes Im female but unfortunately nobody else in the family will take it. Would it count if my son did the test? Its my side Im interested in though, not his fathers side. Thankyou.
Your son could take a Y-DNA test but that would only be helpful if you were interested in learning more about your son's paternal (ie, surname) line.
As a female you can take a mitochondrial DNA test which will tell you about your direct maternal line (your mother, your mother's mother, your mother's mother's mother, and so on) or an autosomal DNA test which will give you matches with genetic cousins on all your family lines going back for about five or six generations. The mtDNA test is more of a deep ancestry test which will tell you which haplogroup (clan mother) you belong to. Autosomal testing is a matching game. You can go on a "fishing expedition" to see what matches turn up but because of the large US bias in the databases the test is best used if you have a particular hypothesis to test, which would require testing other cousins for comparison.
To understand how the tests work you might like to look at these beginners' guides:
http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guides_to_genetic_genealogy
The autosomal tests do give you ethnicity percentages but these are not very reliable and of little interest if you already know from your paper trail that you are 100% European.
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Im surprised anybody bothers using the autosomal tests really. ??? But thankyou.
Edit, just read your post again and it makes more sense to me now. I might end up opting for one :)
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Autosomal dna testing is great. I don't understand why people here would not see the use in it? If you are from England, as the poster seems to be, you will be able to match up with many of your relatives in England who have tested. You will also match up with many of those branches of the family who emigrated. As the matches are good out to 4th or 5th cousins, you are talking about the same generation descendants as you of your 4th or 5th great grandparents. You should have 64 or 128 of these ggrandparents (barring cousins who married in your ancestry) who lived ~1775-1825 or thereabouts depending on your particular circumstances. That opens up many possible matches with branches who left to live in Canada, Australia, the US, NZ, SA etc. As a person from Canada for whom the majority of my ancestors emigrated to Canada around 1820-1840 from England, Ireland and Scotland, I anticipate matching up with many of those who test from the UK. It is definitely a numbers game so the majority of those testing come from the US but there are thousands like me who have also done the testing and count on folks from the UK to participate. I believe that any of matches a person from the UK makes with those living outside the UK are even more useful as there is much greater likelihood of being able to zero in on the most likely place that the overlap occurs as I can tell you that with a diverse range of places that my ancestors came from, I can very likely tell you what part of my tree that your ancestry most likely connects with. I'd encourange you to think again about doing a test. The prices have really come done, currently about $99US for the same test that cost me over $250US a few years ago.
Jason
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I don't understand why people here would not see the use in it?
Because they probably won't find out anything new. If you can trace your rellies on paper to the early 1800s, as most English people can that can cross the censuses, you won't find anything extra by taking an autosomal test like Familyfinder.
If you are from England, as the poster seems to be, you will be able to match up with many of your relatives in England who have tested.
No you won't; most of your English relatives will not have tested so there won't be many, if any, matches.
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I guess I assume the question was related to using dna testing to find relatives, but based on your comments it would seem that only other UK relatives matter and the 100M or maybe 200M?? people living outside the UK of british descent don't count as family....got it.
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With autosomal DNA you first of all have to try and find the connection in the paper trail. The big problem is that when you match a distant cousin whose ancestry is all in Colonial America going back to the 1600s and you have no surnames in common there's just no way you can ever find out how you are related. This does become a problem when there is such a large US bias in the databases. Matches with Australians and Canadians are more hopeful because their trees fall much more within the timescale covered by autosomal DNA testing.
I do have matches with a few people in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, but we've still not been able to find the connection. I have some brickwalls within the last five generations that could potentially be overcome by autosomal DNA testing. I'm hoping that now that the test is so cheap more people will participate and we will start to get meaningful matches. It's going to take a while before the databases reach critical mass for people from the UK.
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I guess I assume the question was related to using dna testing to find relatives, but based on your comments it would seem that only other UK relatives matter and the 100M or maybe 200M?? people living outside the UK of british descent don't count as family....got it.
In an ideal world everybody would spend thousands and take every single test available! Back in the real world, the majority of people have to ration the tests they take to those which will reveal the most information to them and a test like FamilyFinder will be bottom of the list in this respect.