DNA - summary - worth it?

[pandacub]

Taking a DNA test has been a very positive experience for me.  I knew my paternal great grandfather was illegitimate and had an idea who his biological father was.  The test confirmed my suspicions.  I have managed to expand several other branches of my tree, and it's been lovely to connect with distant relatives who I previously didn't know.
A completely different experience for my husband though.  His DNA test bought the shock that his Dad is not his biological father.

[Andrew Tarr]

His DNA test bought the shock that his Dad is not his biological father.

I am intrigued by the responses different people have to unexpected revelations - I would not feel 'shock' but 'surprise'.  To me it is just new information.  One reason I asked for my DNA was to find whether my maternal granny might have had a fling, as she married in 1897 but her only child arrived in 1904.  If that conception had been irregular my mother could have been Anglo-Indian.  There were no obvious signs of that, but scientific evidence could only be interesting ?

[coombs]

I have thought of doing DNA testing for brickwall purposes, but for ethnicity estimates I could be wasting my time as they can all give different results.

Out of all the ancestors each of us have been able to trace, you can guarantee that the odd one will not be a biological ancestor. I guess that increases for ancestors siblings. However it is not all about genetics but who raised your ancestor, and if they shared the same surname and the man (who was not the blood father) was married to the mother, or the baby was part of an informal adoption, then their parents, blood or not, were their parents and played a huge part in your family history.

And often a grandmother passed off an illegitimate grandchild as her last child, a "late arrival".

[LizzieL]

Neither my husband's results or mine have produced anything earth shattering, but it allowed us both to confirm our paper trails. I knew one of my 2 x great grandmothers was illegitimate, but not managed to identify her father yet. Otherwise all my ancestors going back four generations seem to have been fathered by the person named on the birth records.
But it has been a useful exercise in that I've been able to find distant relatives and help them.

[Josephine]

One of my brothers and I did the DNA test and I manage them both.

I haven't been able to solve the mystery of my illegitimate great-grandfather. I haven't found any half-siblings or half-cousins (they're probably out there somewhere). Those were the two main reasons why I wanted to do the test and why I asked my brother to do it, too.

No one has contacted me with any great breakthroughs or revelations.

It has been helpful in other ways, though. One of my ancestors had an unusual Irish surname and I had wondered for years if the other people with that surname who had settled in the same small town in Canada were related, and -- lo and behold! -- I do have DNA matches with some of their descendants. It's a bit frustrating for me, because I still can't find our common ancestors -- and I might never find them. Even so, it has provided confirmation of a familial connection, which is great.

I had been in touch with one descendant of one of the other families years ago because she was doing a kind of one-name study (limited to certain areas). I had shared my research with her at the time. When I checked out the DNA matches, and found that she was one of the descendants of the other families with whom I shared a match, I got back in touch with her. She responded eventually and said that she wasn't going to assume that was correct until she could prove it on paper, which is fair enough. Then she made her Ancestry tree private and I never heard back from her. Oh, well.

[PrawnCocktail]

Strange how people react to even the thought of a DNA test sometimes. To break down a long-standing brick wall, I could really use one of my second / third cousins on my grandmother's side to test. We're almost certainly going to need one of them to test to have any chance of breaking down the wall! So far, I have found 4 - but 3 of them disappeared back into the woodwork when I mentioned the words "DNA test", and the fourth turned out to be adopted.

[LizzieL]

Strange how people react to even the thought of a DNA test sometimes.

My husband was reluctant to do a test - until I did mine and got the results back. Then he couldn't do his fast enough! Too fast I think, because somehow the first one didn't work, but Ancestry sent him a replacement test free. The second was OK. I don't know whether it was fast tracked because it was a repeat, but he got results three weeks after posting it back and I had to wait nearly six. But I was in the Black Friday rush, but his was after that peak.

[Sloe Gin]

Would it be correct to say that as we only inherit 50% of each parent's DNA, some is going to be left behind?  A genealogical ancestor from a few generations back isn't necessarily a genetic ancestor, ie we may not have inherited any of their DNA.

[coombs]

I have a few illegitimate ancestors and one or two cases I have found evidence of a potential father, and may just have to take it that he was, as opposed to looking for a definitive answer. DNA testing may help but as said, you will not inherit DNA from every ancestor, even more recent ones.