Different DNA Test, Different Results

[hurworth]

I don't think these tests are worth taking. Mine came back virtually all British, even going back thousands of years.  You only have to look at my dad to see he's not from British stock! So what's going on here?

Where is your father's ancestry from?

[hurworth]

The supposed "ethnicity" is not the reason I'm interested in genetic genealogy.  I think many of the "naysayers" do not understand genetic genealogy very well.  I find the same naysayers post fairly frequently on this topic on here despite having no actual experience in the field.  I'm not forcing them them to take a test.  I don't understand why they are such misery guts about others choosing to pay for a  genetic genealogy test with their own money.

Autosomal testing has already been very useful in my family and over time as more people test it will be even more so.  It has confirmed who two of my gtgt-grandparents were - in each instance the name of their mother was incorrect on their death certificate.  One had married when father's or parents' names weren't required, so her death certificate was the only document that could link it back.  Clearly there was some sort of estrangement in the family and she wasn't mentioned at all in the death notice when her mother died but her other siblings were.  She was born before official registration commenced in Scotland but is on one census before they emigrated.

The other's age was incorrect on the ship manifest when he emigrated, so that made finding his birth in England harder.   I had a hunch I'd connected them to their births back in Britain and then DNA matches with a 3C and a 3C1R confirmed this.

For me, none of the success relied on ethnicity calculators, but it has helped a relative of a relative.
 She found she had some non-European ancestry which is not from the man she thought was her father.  She has many matches with people with that non-European ancestry.
   

[RobertCasey]

The best ethnic methodology (if you have a pretty robust of pedigree chart of a 100 direct ancestors charted), use the surnames in your pedigree chart and go to io.surname to look up the geographic origins of these surnames - much more accurate than atDNA estimates. Over time however, atDNA will improve as the methodology is fine tuned and improved.

I have noticed that these boards have a lot of negative comments due to high expectations that DNA will reveal a lot pretty quickly. Just like genealogy, genetic genealogy takes an investment of time and funds to get there and there is luck involved as well. As usual, those with more means (those that won battles and had enough not to starve to death) were more prolific (M222, L226 and CTS4466) - while other lines have barely survived over the last 1,000 years where progress will be much slower due to smaller sample sizes of testers.

[Asaerrin]

I have the same problem- but what I found was that, the more i tested with different companies ( free ones mostly) I started to get a bigger picture of my DNA.. i sort of got a mean of all the results together. my results summed up were

ancestry dna
almost all irish- french - tiny bit of Spanish scandinavian

23and me
almost all irish- french- tiny bit of ashkenazi jewish

family tree dna
irish eastern europe

livingdna
irish and 5 percent indian???

my heritage
Irish, scandinavian 7 percent west asia

DNALand
irish, scandinavian, Finnish, spanish, european jewish, india/ west asian

Then gedmatch managed to break these down even further... I sort of cross referenced all the tests, and researched the movement of people around these parts, to understand why i was getting such a different genetic makeup from all these websites.

I still don't really know though, hope the science gets better to the point where they are agreeing more. some sites say I'm up to 20 percent west asian- then others say completely european !! aaahhhhh

overall I think the DNA tests are worth doing- even if it is new science- as I didn't even know I was Irish so....

[Kimbrey]

This is Roberta Estes recent Blog on DNA

https://dna-explained.com/2018/05/11/pass-the-dna-please/

Kim

[Mart 'n' Al]

A year on from making a couple of comments above on this thread, as I await the arrival of my test kit and having done lots of research, I now realise that these DNA tests are good for DNA matches but of little more than guidelines if not just entertainment as for ethnicity estimates. I do realise that these marketing strategies can be a bit misleading but I still look forward to hearing what my ethnicity estimates are. I anticipate 90% northern English.

Martin

[sugarfizzle]

Martin, I'm willing to bet you won't get 90% Northern England.

1. Depends who you tested with, I suppose, but Ancestry, Ftdna and MyHeritageDNA do not appear to have such a category.

2. You are highly unlikely to get what you think you should be with whichever company you test with, as shown by the many queries rootschat get about ethnicity.

3. You are highly unlikely to actually be 90% Northern English.

Regards Margaret

Correction. Ancestry do have a Northern English category. My ancestry is mainly Southern English and it does say that for me, but no percentage is given.

Regards Margaret

[Mart 'n' Al]

I will report back in 6-8 weeks!

Martin