Genetic Genealogy Webinar is a success!

Hugh, your mother’s brother’s son (your cousin) would represent your mother’s father’s paternal line (your grandfather). So, if that is the line that you are interested in, have your cousin take the Paternal Lineage Test.

Either of you can start a DNA Group representative of the line in question and can both be members as your genetic genealogy study progresses.

Sharon, you can advise your brother to go ahead and take the DNA test. There should be no affect to the testing from his medications.

Renate, we are sorry you missed the webinar. Hope that you will view the archived version. The webinar has been advertised on the Blog and our homepage. Once participants registered, event notifications were sent as reminders. This was our first webinar. Each one should be an improvement on the past. Thanks for your comments.

Alexander, Ancestry.com DNA allows you to input results from another testing company. Doing so provides you with access to the Ancestry.com DNA database and the potential to match with the participants. Furthermore, you can attach those results to an online family tree. Participants tested directly with Ancestry.com DNA will also receive a haplogroup designation and a multi-page results packet with detailed information describing the user’s ancient ancestry and DNA results.

A note of caution: standards for genetic genealogy have been slow to form, so there are some differences in nomenclature among the organizations. Therefore, in some cases conversion may be necessary to compare apples to apples. A good resource to consult on marker standards is can be found here.

Judy, good news! Your father’s half-brothers share the same Y chromosome as did your father (provided they had the same father as you indicated in your description). So, they and/or their sons or any other direct males down the line will be able to represent your paternal line!

Taylor, Your feedback from your original comment was added to our feedback and enhancement list.

Neither your haplogroup prediction nor your DNA test result will reveal the percentage of a given ancestral ethnicity nor the precise tribe from which you may descend.

There is great controversy over “ethnicity” type testing and many user experiences can be easily found by doing Google searches on the web. Articles and scientific papers can also be found discussing this type of testing which would be helpful for you and others to evaluate.

Just last week, an article arguing for tighter controls on DNA Ancestry testing was published. From it, we read “In the past year, scientists, sociologists and bioethicists, among others, have come to agree that the technology of these direct-to-consumer tests, which run between $100 and $1,000 apiece, is problematic and that the test results can be misleading and lead to problems including skewed ethnic data and questionable membership claims to Native American tribes.”

The issues the folks in the article are upset about are largely due to the differences in inheritance patterns of the various types of DNA used in DNA genealogy i.e. Y DNA, mtDNA and autosomal DNA and the limitations of each and what definitively can be determined or not determined using these in DNA genealogy testing.

Mary, it is important when reviewing matches that both individuals were tested on the majority of markers Y33 or Y46. (You want to match on all but two or three markers.)

Both of your participants fall into this category – and one of your participants has several exact matches! That is good. I would strongly recommend contacting the potential matches to collaborate on family history and a possible common ancestor.

Sometimes, if there is a match, and the surnames are different there could have been an adoption, illegitimacy or name change. It is with the marriage of DNA and paper genealogies that will show where the actual common paternal ancestor is.

For your information: The “Paternal DNA Matches” screen displays matches in a ranked order based on the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) between the user and the individual in the list. (MRCA refers to a statistical calculation that determines the likely range of generations in which two individuals share a common ancestor.) MRCA calculations are based on the number of markers tested, the number of matching values and the mutation rate of the markers. This calculation does not take into account the surnames of the individuals involved.