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Interesting.

It seems they are/will be offering full genome testing for about £25.

The company Nucleus Genomics said they expect full genome tests to come down to practically zero in price.

That's quite telling that FTDNA are offering their full Y at $450.

Hopefully this will be the push required to see some innovation. Full genome can be used to extract Y and mt haplogroups. Would be good to see many more tests taken to match against.

DUPE

Given that you are from the US, you will have more chance of finding a match. Maybe 80% of their tests have been sold in the US.

I'm pretty sure their tests are grossly overpriced over what they could be - about $450, which is more than you can get a full genome tests for.

When deciding to upgrade a Y test, look at your closest matches, and see what time range they suggest you are related. If you have matches they think could be related in the more feasible genealogical period (1750-1950) then a big-Y test might give you some more useful details. Otherwise you might get about the same info with Y-111.

This issue with big-Y is you need the other person to have took the test, and there's maybe only 100,000 people who have taken them.

As mentioned above, you will likely have more luck with atDNA, by going through all your matches to about 30-40cM and shared matches. You will be able to account for some of your lines, then be left with other clusters of matches that you don't know where they fit in. I think someone has written an overview of how that's done. It takes quite a lot of time.

I upgraded from 67 to big-Y. I think previously with 67 they suggested some of my closest matches could be in the earlier genealogical window, c. 1650. But when I got the big-Y results, I found they gave my closest matches with the common ancestor born in the window 1300. Given that most of these tests are sold in the US, I don't have much hope of a particularly close match coming up. It's probably more likely Ancestry will start to offer them at a reasonable price and find a closer match that way.

I have a few Y-DNA tests and none of them provide anything genealogically useful. We'd need millions of tests, like with atDNA, for it to really be useful. But they are useful for being able to provide a paternal immigration route. You don't necessarily need big-Y for that. If you are from the US, and have no known line back to the UK or elsewhere, you can potentially get an idea of where in Europe they came from.

It seems very likely. Your match 412cM is most likely a half 1st cousin, or 1C1R, but could be other relationships. Given you match with her closely, have no paper-trail overlap, and no matches for your supposed paper trail line, it seems like an overlap.

Jews take DNA tests at very high rates, so you should have lots of clusters of DNA matches that are Jewish.

It would be worth asking this DNA match from MyHeritage is they would take a DNA test with Ancestry. As mentioned above, MH is not very useful. ~99% of the value you get from DNA tests will be on Ancestry. If you have their test on Ancestry, you can then easily see who are common matches and identify common ancestors among those matches, which should give you at least some vague coordinates on who your biological grandfather is.

    I think this is exactly what you would expect with pedigree collapse...
    The south was relatively sparsely populated like much of rural USA so much like Europe if your family was in an area early, the the chances of pedigree collapse are much higher, so you will have 20cM matches who are closer to 10cM matches in time. You can see you are related, but it is before records began or before the 1600’s even. So it is not USA ancestry so much as USA descent, someone emigrated a long time ago and you are seeing that signature in the resulting US population.

Happy Hunting

Your suggestion is that there is a relatively small pool of ancestors in the south/Carolinas, that lead to a greater representation of the footprints of certain ancestors in the gene pool, and thus these matches could be more distant?

What are your thoughts on when false positives creep into Ancestry? At what cM level. a quick Grok give >= 15cM should be about 0% false positives.