Origins through DNA (General)

by Richard Hulan , Friday, July 20, 2012, 03:10 (4512 days ago) @ Roger Griffiths

Other companies providing the service, for a variety of prices and with a wide range of results (to be compared with databases of varying size) include Oxford Ancestry (in the UK); Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and Ancestry dot com (in the USA); at least one in Italy, one in Russia, one in China... and so on. Once you have tested somewhere, in many cases you can enter your results into search engines independent of the testing companies, and find your best matches who may well have tested elsewhere. A few of those are Ysearch, Gedmatch, and SMGF. Your "matches" may not have been kin to you for a few thousand years (it depends on what is being matched), but if you have the same mutations you have a common ancestor -- usually quite a bit more recent than Adam and Eve.

This area of science is not a Scottish monopoly, and haplogroups that particularly interest Jim Wilson in Edinburgh aren't necessarily quite so interesting in the Forest of Dean. Read up on it, shop around, see what you get for your money. I've been involved in projects at FTDNA, and in my opinion the best value for the amount spent is there (lower initial cost, larger data base). Some companies specialize in ethnic or regional ancestry of one sort or another. Some are affiliated with big university-based projects -- most of which, however, don't test very many markers, and don't make the surnames of their tested subjects public -- so they aren't so useful, for genealogy. (These strict privacy rules have to do with medical research interests of the people who have paid for the testing, such as the Wellcome Trust.)

In the near future, look for publications from the "People of the British Isles" project. Those people know what they are about, and they have done some DNA testing in the Forest of Dean. So far, they are focused on autosomal DNA -- all of one's ancestry -- whereas the article cited for this discussion thread is about Y-DNA (surname or male-line lineages) and mtDNA (female line, your mother's mother's mother, etc.).

There is an annual WDYTYA conference, a sort of spinoff from the "Who Do You Think You Are?" TV show. That conference has good speakers and programs on genetic genealogy -- although the theme may or may not be interesting, in any given year. It's just another place to look for solid, pretty current information.