DNA Analysis

You can subscribe for a month.

Ideally, you’d have the tree on it as it can use an algorithm to work out relationships of distant cousins.

I did my DNA on Ancestry and FamilyTree. FamilyTree was totally useless, btw. Your mileage may vary.

I have my tree on Ancestry but it's private for various reasons. However, I made a 'skeleton' tree to attach to my DNA results. It has all my known direct ancestors back to the great-greats and some beyond. It has just basic info such as names and places and dates of birth and death. This is a huge help with the extremely valuable 'Shared Matches' feature.

I do have a World membership as Ancestry is so useful for me. Just this week, a new member--a distant cousin I never heard of--posted a family doc with details about my great-great-great grandmother who immigrated from Co Antrim to Kansas in the 1860s. You might subscribe to Ancestry for a month to see if it's of any use to you.

mindhorn wrote: »

For those who have used AncestryDNA, have you also subscribed for a month/year? I'm waiting for my results to come back and seeing if I'll get the most out of it by subscribing. It'll be another approx 160 euro per year, so it isn't cheap, but I don't want to spend 100 euro on the test and not reap the full benefits.

And if you have subscribed, have you put your family tree on there as well? I have my tree saved elsewhere offline so would have to start populating it from scratch.

Have subscribed to Ancestry on and off over the past few years but to be honest its just to look at trees on the site as have more or less exhausted their record collections that are/were useful to me.

Have my tree on there connected to a couple of DNA tests.To be honest its more or less essential as I find that a DNA match without a tree is of very little use esp. if the person either doesn't reply to a message or perhaps hasn't been active on the site for a long time.
Only hope in that case is to look at shared matches and maybe try and work out any possible connection.

Have also uploaded test results to FTDNA,Gedmatch and My Heritage as well as a couple of Facebook groups.
Find none of them as good as Ancestry but then only using the available free resources on the other sites so perhaps an unfair comparison.

Found that Ancestry provided the most results for close DNA matches (up to 3rd/4th cousin).FTDNA gives me 433 results in total with 60/70 matching with 30cM or more,My Heritage 8050 matches with about 100 showing a match with 30cM or more shared,Gedmatch 3000 hits with about 30 over 30cM.Ancestry gives me 150 plus matches with at least 30cM shared.

Agree with the poster above when he says Ancestry has a lot of users who seem to have no interest in looking at the site after an initial look at their results or so I find.Many never respond to message's and a lot of users haven't logged in for a year plus.

Agree its frustrating with some DNA matches who seem to show no inclination to follow up but that's people I suppose.
For example have a match on Ancestry of 53cM over 3 segments that I have no clue whatsoever about.All I can figure out is that they are related on my fathers side as no match to my mother's DNA results.
They share no matches with any known relatives although they and I have 10 plus shared matches.

Smallest definite ones on Ancestry for me are;
daughter of 3rd cousin with 11cM shared (know them in real life so simple enough)
4th cousin once removed with 10cM shared (from well researched tree they have)
son of 3rd cousin with 9cM shared (from tree plus aware of the general family group,surnames etc from USA).In between this person and their father (34cM shared) ranked on shared DNA in the group I have 51 matches who look very likely to be related on the same line and I can only place 6 in my tree for definite.Another 2/3 I can guess at but the remainder I have no clue as no trees attached and radio silence re. messaging.
That's the frustrating bit but making a breakthrough is what makes it interesting,well for me anyways.

So many points to make, sorry.

There are a lot of serious researchers on Ancestry. You'll connect if you're on long enough, often enough and demonstrate your own serious approach to the subject. Having said that, I have gotten--and shared--info with those who are not 'serious' but are related to me.

I keep my main tree private as too many people copy willy-nilly--photos, records, whatever--who are no relation at all and have crazy trees with people in the 1900s giving birth to people in the 1700s and the like.

I also keep it private as it is very easy to find living people if you have the names of their deceased parents, spouses, grandparents etc. I sometimes do it myself but I don't want it done unto me or my living relatives.

On Ancestry, I have 236 fourth cousins or closer. Ancestry defines that as 20 or more shared centimorgans. I have identified the relationship with almost all of them. I also have been able to identify a number of 5th to 8th cousins, down to between six and 19 shared cms. Trees are critical here.

There is enough info on my skeleton tree for a serious researcher to figure out our relationship. I get replies to most of my queries and I always, always reply to the queries I receive--and share those photos and records with actual relatives.

Hermy wrote: »

Having a tree on Ancestry and not sharing it with anyone is far from pointless.

Again, why?

Maybe its me but whats with all the "nobody is allowed to copy my work" vibe ?
To me a family tree is just that; an accumulation of names ,dates ,facts, stories etc put together and called X family tree.
Whats the point of doing it if its to be kept a secret?

Oh and by the way what is a "serious" researcher ?
To me its a bit of fun doing it during the long winter nights and lets be honest here 99.99% of its as easy as pie,its the last little bit that makes it challenging and interesting.

Sorry if all the above comes across as a bit scathing but people who take a hobby that serious always give me the idea that they are taking all the fun out of it.And is that not what it is in essence,a bit of fun?

spurious wrote: »

I know we have gone a little off topic here, but seriously considering giving Ancestry a miss once the current sub runs out. I think they are very overpriced for what they offer, it really annoys me that new subscribers can get deals whereas people with them for years can't, but the last straw is the completely ludicrous (wrong country/continent etc.) 'hints' they keep giving me.

They clearly send them to less discerning types too, who add huge swathes of my tree to theirs resulting in 72 and 8 year old mothers. I used to message such people to point out they had made a mistake, but was either ignored or abused.

Find the hint function very annoying.
Before I subscribed I wondered about all these seemingly "relevant" hints for my tree but when you actually look at them they are very much a scattergun approach and even at that some are so far out that whoever programmed it must really have been told to make it as vague as possible.

Only time I found it of any use is when someone uploads or updates a tree with perhaps a distant relative of mine.At least saves trawling through countless "John Murphy " and "Mary Byrne" born somewhere/sometime.

It's guarantee that his terminal SNP isn't just P312.

P312 arose in a single man probably some time in late Neolithic/Early Copper age. Nearly all R1b men in Ireland are P312+ (most are positive for it's major branch L21), the other major branch of R1b that you see is it's 'brother clade' U106. Which is mostly associated with surnames of more English origin in Ireland.

You mentioned that he tested at FTDNA, did he do a SNP bundle test to get to P312? In context of Ireland if he's P312+ and L21- then good probability he would test positive for DF27.

Back in 2013 Hammer had following map in a presentation, obviously 7 years is a long time, not only do we have better understanding of the phylogeny we also know that the idea of R1b arising in Anatolia is probably wrong given Ancient DNA evidence.

Has anyone tried using the Leeds Method to organise your matches?

I only have 11 shared matches between my 2nd and 3rd cousins. I can identify the matches on my grandmother's side (maternal) and grandfather's side (paternal). But lacking matches on the other sides.

Out of curiosity I added 100 4th-6th cousins to the list and again they mostly fall in to the first two clusters. I have four colours and one colour just has three matches out of 111, which seems quite low but maybe this is normal.