What information can I find out from DNA results.

[S128]

Hi

I recently did Ancestry DNA and I thought it would maybe help me on a dead end I have seemed to reach with my Maternal Great Grandfather. I'm confused on how to use the results to get any further on my tree as most of the people I have matched with don't have trees of their own and the ones that do are from a different line.

I don't know if it would be helpful for me to post my results here?

If you could tell me how you used yours to get further back in your tree

Thanks

[familydar]

Hi S128

First of all I'd suggest you contact the Ancestry people who are coming up as matches and haven't uploaded trees.  I presume you do have a tree associated with your results so they will be able to see if any of their lines look as if they might mesh with yours.  Hopefully they'll be prepared to email you a GEDcom or give you guest access to their tree if it's private.  I hope so, there's nothing more frustrating than a contact telling you that they can't see a match when you have no idea what they're looking at!

Then upload your Ancestry results to GEDMatch and to FTDNA.  You may get some more promising leads from one or other of those sites.  Don't forget to upload your own pedigree tree to these places too.

Don't expect to get your head around DNA testing immediately, there's lots to learn and FTDNA, GEDMatch and Ancestry all have different tools, but it should be possible to derive some leads from the results you have, as long as someone else descended from the same great grandmother or her close family has tested.  And keep revisiting because all the databases are growing daily.

I don't have an Ancestry account but I'm sure there are lots of people on RC who will be able to advise you on how best to proceed.

Jane :-)

[S128]

Thank you for the reply! very helpful


I have put my information into GEDmatch and to be honest I'm really confused as to which one I should follow or what it all means and how the two compare.

These are my AncestryDNA results....

Africa - 1%
Africa North - 1%
Europe 99%
Great Britain - 58%
Europe West - 39%
Italy/Greece - 1%
Iberian Peninsula - 1%


Then GEDmatch using Eurogenes k13

North_Atlantic - 46.29%
Baltic - 25.03%
West_Med - 13.94%
East_Med - 8.03%
West_Asian - 4.72%
Amerindian - 0.95%
South_Asian - 0.59%
Red_Sea - 0.23%
Northeast_African - 0.2%
Oceanian - 0.01%

Especially confused about the West Asian and Amerindian?

[familydar]

Hi again S128 - do you have a name?

The ethnicity values (which are the results you have posted) calculated by the different companies are based on their own data, not the world as a whole, and they almost certainly use different algorithms - you'll note they don't use the same descriptive areas - so that's why they appear to differ.  You'll find they change over time as their databases grow.  So the "which one should I follow" question is a bit academic.

If you want to try to find others descended from your great grandmother and her parents you need to be looking at your autosomal match results.  I'm not sure what these are called on Ancestry but on GEDMatch start by doing a one to many comparison against your kit number.  And please do upload your results to FTDNA if you've not already done so because there's a strong likelihood there will be people on there who aren't on Ancestry or GEDMatch.  I think you might need to pay to see ethnicity results on FTDNA (they call it MyOrigins) but ethnicity results won't be what demolish your brick wall(s) so personally I wouldn't bother.  It costs nothing to upload your data to FTDNA and see your Family Finder matches (and no ongoing subscription either).

Jane :-)

[S128]

Hi again S128 - do you have a name?

The ethnicity values (which are the results you have posted) calculated by the different companies are based on their own data, not the world as a whole, and they almost certainly use different algorithms - you'll note they don't use the same descriptive areas - so that's why they appear to differ.  You'll find they change over time as their databases grow.  So the "which one should I follow" question is a bit academic.

If you want to try to find others descended from your great grandmother and her parents you need to be looking at your autosomal match results.  I'm not sure what these are called on Ancestry but on GEDMatch start by doing a one to many comparison against your kit number.  And please do upload your results to FTDNA if you've not already done so because there's a strong likelihood there will be people on there who aren't on Ancestry or GEDMatch.  I think you might need to pay to see ethnicity results on FTDNA (they call it MyOrigins) but ethnicity results won't be what demolish your brick wall(s) so personally I wouldn't bother.  It costs nothing to upload your data to FTDNA and see your Family Finder matches (and no ongoing subscription either).

Jane :-)

Thanks Jane, my name is Will by the way!

On GEDmatch I have found a page that has shown lot's of people who are matched to me, I don't know if it's because I'm maybe not as sharp as others but I have no idea what all the numbers mean on the page where they are, the only things I can understand is email addresses and names  . I cannot seem to understand it for the life of me. Maybe I can find some sort of tutorial on Youtube. But yeah it's a bit of a minefield for me and in all honesty I feel like giving up  I thought the DNA thing would make it all a little easier maybe.

I have also set up an account for FTDNA and I am waiting for my account to be approved by a moderator.

[Ruskie]

Will,

Presumably you took a Y-DNA test? How many markers did you test?

It is possible that your "matches" may be so far back in time that you will never find any connection. It would be worth contacting them anyway in case they have an understanding of the results and where you may match.

(I agree it is a complex subject - there are far too many numbers for me to ever have a chance of understanding properly. ) 

Added: Have you asked for help here with your dead end?

[familydar]

I think the results Will has on Ancestry and GEDMatch relate to an autosomal test because that's the only one Ancestry do (unless something has changed very recently).

The attached screen grab is of the top four results when I do a GEDMatch one to many for my father (names and email addresses redacted to protect the guilty!).  First column is kit number, which is the number GEDMatch will have allocated when you uploaded your data.  "A" kits are Ancestry, "T" kits are FTDNA, other prefixes will relate to results from other testing companies.

The matches with whom you share the most DNA (the biggest numbers) are by default at the top of the table - on my screen grab the top one is me and next one down is my father's first cousin. 

There are some underlined clickable links and the results page says what each of them is except for "GED" which means there is a tree associated with that particular kit. 

The sub-column headed "Gen" under the Autosomal group of columns means generations difference.  It's only an estimate which is why it gives 2.1 for the cousin but it gets it spot-on for me.  So that gives you an idea of how many generations you need to work back to find the common ancestor.  If the number is around 4 or 5 (and that's where about 10% of my father's matches fall, the others are much lower) the most recent common ancestor could be any one of his 2x or 3x great grandparents, so that's 16 or 32 people to identify. 

However A*y describe or advertise it, DNA testing isn't a shortcut to working back your family tree the old-fashioned way, but it can provide confirmation of suspicions or hypotheses.

Jane :-)

[davidft]

I cannot seem to understand it for the life of me. Maybe I can find some sort of tutorial on Youtube.

There are tutorials and articles on both Ancestry and Gedmatch that should answer a lot of your questions

[4b]

Finding matches with autosomal tests is quite a lot of slog, particularly if you're not an American, who appear to make up the lion's share of test subjects. I've been with FTDNA for several years and most of my matches are American. Even for the closer ones it's often difficult to see any possible connection. Most people don't have trees or any surnames. Some people who have taken the tests have no paper trial or are maybe a 3rd cousin most of whose ancestry is not covered by the tests.

I have blasted out emails to many of my closest matches and get pretty good return rates, but they are mostly Americans, largely marooned from any lines back to the UK.

However I have had a couple of good matches from FTDNA - I think 3 or 4, with several others I just can't quite make the link with. One of them was a case where I had no baptism for an ancestor. I had analysed the local parish register and found that there was a William and Ann Griffiths who had children baptised in the parish up to 1793. Given the age of the wife, she would have been expected to have children for a few more years. My ancestor was born in 1795 and had a child named William Griffiths [Surname]. So I presumed she was the daughter of William and Ann Griffiths, but wasn't going to take it further from there. On FTDNA I matched up with two people. One was also a descendant of William and Ann Griffiths and another was a descendant of Ann's sister. We all matched up together on relatively the same blocks. So I have taken this as proof of parentage. As more people get tested I think this will become more common; and hopefully we can start bridging some of these emigrant families back to their British ancestors. It's a great experience to trace your ancestors back to their homeland. I have a few ancestors who were from India and have been lucky enough to trace two lines back to the UK and one to Persia. Opening up realms of ancestry into regions far flung from the tiny center of almost all of my ancestry on the Welsh border.

What I do is:

Login to FTDNA from time to time
Go to My Matches under FamilyFinder
Sort them by date
Open all the ones that have trees and look at the others that list only surnames
I will email any of the latter or any close connections without any details

Personally I've found the FTDNA results to be better than Ancestry and since I don't subscribe to Ancestry I can't see anything anyway.