Taking the Ancestry.com DNA Kit

I was excited when I got my Ancestry.com DNA test results. Due to my genealogy research there were no big shocks for me but it did verify and validate some of the intuitive leaps I took in assuming who my family members were. 

That’s exciting news, Ancestor Hunters!

The kit itself is straightforward. No drinking or eating for a half hour. Spit in a tube to the line. Package it in the packing they provide. Put it in the mail. Wait for an e-mail. They say 4-6 weeks for results. Mine came in 4 weeks.

These results are the 50% of DNA I received from my mother. I am curious now for my sister to take it because she may have received different maternal genes than me and her percentage make-up may vary. Because women are XX we can only map the X code. We have no Y to trace. If I want to know the paternal DNA, which I do, I have to poke the nearest and closest male relative on that side of the family. That’s my dad. The ideal option would be a brother but dad is second best. The further away you go the more variations that occur between what they got and what I got, so the percentages quickly become guesstimates. But it’s closer than not knowing anything.

Culturally, all of my ancestors are all of my ancestors. I only exist because they each existed. So to layer that with the concept that there is actual genetic code from some of them in my body now... I think that’s cool.

I should also note that men have a choice to do maternal or paternal or both as they have both the X and Y. I'm a bit jealous of that.

When you do the kit you have to activate it on-line first which involves creating an account on Ancestry.com. I hesitated to do it as I already had an account with my dad but it goes to his e-mail and he doesn’t check it often and I didn’t want to have to wait on him getting them to me- haha! Totally true. So I started a new account so I could get the results as soon as they were ready. And it afforded me the chance to try it out from a fresh perspective.

It’s free to do. And it ended up being better than I expected. When my results came in, they included a list of other people who have been tested and who allowed for their tests to be shared for this purpose. So my results came with a list of second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth cousins... Their messenger feature allowed me to send messages to some of my new-found cousins to see how we related to one another!

Then I was offered the ThruLines option. If I plugged in a family tree I’d be able to see what ancestors all those new cousins and I shared in common. Cool! I figured that this was going to be where they were going to asking me to join a membership. Nope. Making the family tree comes with the free account. It's researching their archives that costs money. 

[It might be worth it to do the family tree and then subscribe to the site for a month and do research on the names you have.]

Even without the ability to search the archives, the tree maker is fantastic and better than any other free ones on the web. Ancestry.com is constantly upgrading their applications and a new feature on the family tree offers you potential fathers and mothers for the names you plug in. You can accept or deny them, or even say 'maybe' so you don’t necessarily need to pay to search. Ancestry.com helps you do that.

That meant I did not have to manually plug in the 2200 names I had already! It offered me about 1600 of the names I already had. I double-checked what they offered against my notes from the family tree my father and I have been working on together and what Ancestry.com suggested to me was 98% accurate.

That was a feature I did not expect.

Along with the percentage results you get a map with the countries your people are from highlighted. 

A cool feature with the maps is that if you click on the seemingly random century timeline on the bottom it will show you where your people were at the start of each century. You can see vague migration patterns. And if you’re very English, like me, and your people don’t move around so much, you can zoom in on the map and see it in more detail!

I am very happy with this test. It’s the only one I’ve taken so I can’t speak to any others. I would like to take the 23&me test to see what genetic anomalies lurk in my ancestral blood and see how the results compare.

As far as genetic privacy goes, you have options when you activate the kit. You can change those options anytime you want through your account settings. They were explained well. I should say that the more private your settings the less matches you will find yourself with. I risked it. I don’t like making choices-for-now based on what might happen in the future. But it's a personal choice. You can have your account and dna deleted at any time. 

I’ll be posting about some of the things I learned in the upcoming weeks. Happy hunting to my fellow genealogists!

A consumer reports article that walks you through how to delete dna results from 23&me, Ancestry, and My Heritage.