How satisfied are you with your DNA test experience?

[sugarfizzle]

To all those frustrated by matches without trees - don't forget that a small number of them will be adoptees who have no idea of their family history, and are waiting for someone to reach out to them.

Anybody closer than a fourth cousin I will always contact, tree or no tree. Also any 4th to 6th cousins who share matches with a group of people who I positively connect with.

Of course they will be in the minority, and I haven't come across any adoptees yet.

Regards Margaret

[Jill Eaton]

I've uploaded my raw Ancestry data onto a couple of other sites.

I contacted someone early last week and we've had a couple of email conversations since then.

It turns out that my paternal gt grandfather had been married at least once before and had a son. He did put "bachelor" on his marriage certificate to my gt grandmother. My contact is a descendent of the earlier marriage and had no knowledge that our shared ancestor had not only married again but fathered more children.

I looked up her grandfather on the 1881 census and the 1891 where he was living with grandparents which would explain why our shared gt grandfather was absent - he was living with his new family!
And they were both living pretty close to each other. I've no way of knowing whether my gt grandmother ever knew of her husband's earlier marriage and son or whether the son knew he had younger half siblings

Neither of us would have known about the separate families without the DNA match which was predicted at sharing a gt grandparent.

[sugarfizzle]

How interesting, Jill.

Must have been devastating at the time for wife number one, but it is fascinating to look back at.

Did he marry wife no 1 between censuses, so only showed as single, then married to your great grandfather, or did you look at him married to the other lady and decide he wasn't 'yours'?

Thanks for sharing.

Regards Margaret

[Jill Eaton]

How interesting, Jill.

Did he marry wife no 1 between censuses, so only showed as single, then married to your great grandfather, or did you look at him married to the other lady and decide he wasn't 'yours'?

Thanks for sharing.

Regards Margaret

He married wife number 1 in July 1871 so was single on the 1871 census. Wife number 1 died in 1873. He then married my gt grandmother in 1878 so there was no reason to think there had ever been an earlier marriage.

Yay for DNA!

[hdw]

I posted this earlier on a different thread but I don't suppose it matters if I paste it in here, as it's more relevant to this thread. People were talking about testing DNA with different agencies. I have a distant cousin who is a full-time genealogist. She persuaded me to do the FTDNA Family Finder test, and nearly all the "matches" I got were utterly meaningless to me. Then she uploaded my data to MyHeritage, with startling results -
======

It's great fun testing with different agencies and comparing the results. I posted my FTDNA results a few pages back. I now have results from MyHeritage which make me feel quite exotic -
Irish, Scottish & Welsh (i.e. Celtic)  60.2%
Scandinavian                                 19.3%
Finnish                                          4.9%
Iberian                                          6.8%
Italian                                           2.1%
Baltic                                            4.7%
Nigerian                                        1%
North African                                 1%

Bear in mind that my parents were fishermen's offspring from adjacent villages in the East Neuk of Fife. I've traced both sides of my family back for hundreds of years and the most exotic ancestors, for a Fifer like me, came from Northumberland and Northern Ireland.

But I'm impressed by MyHeritage. One of my first matches turned out to be the daughter of one of my 2nd cousins. But she was eclipsed by a match I got the other day, who shared 7.5% of my DNA, 544.1cM, 22 shared segments out of 23 - and he is the grandson of my long-lost uncle Eck (Alexander Watson) who settled in Hartlepool in Co. Durham before I was born, married there and had 6 children, about whom I knew next to nothing.

Harry

[Finley 1]

I cant fathom my results with one company never mind more..


xin

[Sinann]

To all those frustrated by matches without trees - don't forget that a small number of them will be adoptees who have no idea of their family history, and are waiting for someone to reach out to them.


Regards Margaret

My first contact is the son of an adoptee, we made fairly good progress breaking down where the match is but need one or two more people matching to get it over the line but just making contact with a living, even if distant, relation was very exciting for them.

I don't have a tree but so far that hasn't given me any problems.

[hurworth]

My first contact is the son of an adoptee, we made fairly good progress breaking down where the match is but need one or two more people matching to get it over the line but just making contact with a living, even if distant, relation was very exciting for them.

I don't have a tree but so far that hasn't given me any problems.

Recently I've helped an adoptee.  Using DNA matches, their trees and some records we found his mother. 

Using the trees of DNA matches, plus analysing segments, we know who his paternal grandparents were.

If none of the matches had trees I don't think we'd have got this far.

[gazania]

 I too have mixed feelings about DNA tests.  What bothers me most is that people new to family research (both young and not so young) feel that they have to take a test to start their research, mainly from the extensive advertising.

However, from my own nearly 1600 matches, I have had some success.  One match had placed her tree online for me to see where I was able to tell her where we connected.  She was descended from the sister of my great great grandfather and where the parish register in question was unreadable.  So the match had lots of brick walls broken down for her.

Another match contacted me as we shared a very rare surname.  Now I know what happened to my great grandfather's half sister, who was the sole survivor after her mother and siblings died within a very short time of one another.

Two other matches were already known to me and we have expanded our connections.

I have explored other potential matches specially as they came from the same small village. While I could not match up on paper despite one even sharing the same occupation, (was there some hanky panky?) I found the exercise rewarding despite the shared frustrations as aired on this thread.