Which company should I use to test my DNA?
There are a number of companies offering tests, and each has a slightly different offer. There are various studies online which evaluate the different options, and you can find them if you Google around a little. The important thing you need to know if you are testing in order to find unknown birth family, is that you should have your DNA on as many of those company platforms as you can. DNA genealogists call that ‘fishing in as many ponds’ as possible.
The first place you must test is with Ancestry.com. Depending upon where you live there may be a different local version of their website, .co.uk or .ca for instance, which you will redirected to, but all DNA results are displayed on all versions so don’t let that worry you. Ancestry is vital because it has by far the biggest number of people for you to be matched with (15 million+). It also has good tools to help you to cluster your matches – and we will explain this later.
Then when you have tested with Ancestry, it is possible to download your raw DNA and transfer it to other company platforms. We recommend that you transfer it to My Heritage.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com and if you are in the UK, to LivingDNA.com. This then ensures you can have your DNA compared with at least another 5 million testers. It is preferable to pay the small sum on each platform to unlock further matching tools, but it is not essential. If you struggle with your clustering, you will probably have to do this though, so be prepared.
Ideally, if you can afford it, you should also take an additional test with 23andMe because they do not accept transfers from other platforms, and they do host a further 10 million+ tests. (Ancestry don’t accept transfers either incidentally, which is another reason why you need to start with them).
And finally, you need to transfer your raw DNA data to Gedmatch.com which contains tools that no other site does. This is the site that will tell you whether your parents were related to each other and whether you and a potential half sibling share a father rather than a mother.
So, to reiterate, if you are looking for your father (or another birth relative) you need to test with Ancestry and 23andMe and then transfer the results from just one of those (it doesn’t matter which) to Gedmatch, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA and if you are in the UK to LivingDNA.
Louise’s Ancestry DNA test revealed that she had previously unknown Jewish Ancestry. Testing various relatives in pursuit of the truth, revealed that her grandmother had a mystery unknown Jewish father who was not the man on her birth certificate. Louise transferred her DNA to all the recommended sites and spent nearly 5 years investigating the family trees of thousands of 4th cousin DNA matches, looking for connections. She got nowhere. It was only when she purchased a test with 23andMe that she found two second cousins once removed and was able to crack the mystery in an afternoon. This is a great example of the need to fish in all the ponds.
What is the procedure for taking a DNA test?
It is pretty simple. When you purchase a test online, a kit will be sent to you in a box through the post. You will either spit in a tube, or take a cheek swab, from the comfort of your own home, and send it back, freepost. This is not a blood test. It is recommended that you take the test in the morning before you have cleaned your teeth.
Very occasionally tests fail, and you may need to be sent a free replacement.
How long will I have to wait for my results?
It generally takes between a month and six weeks depending upon the time of year and any sales that might be taking place that have built up a queue in the lab.
How will I get my results and what will they contain?
You will be sent an email by the testing company to let you know when your kit has arrived with them, and later when processing has begun. Finally, you will receive an email to say that your results are available.
You will see two sections; one will be your ethnicity mix. This may indicate that your ancestors came from a foreign country for instance, or a region in your own country. It is not an exact science, and it is still evolving, but it gives some good clues for where to look next. If you know that your birth mother was Swedish for instance, and your DNA ethnicity indicates you are half Irish, you can be pretty sure that your father was from Ireland. If you are British, your DNA may indicate which part of the country you should be looking at.
Annie took a DNA test to find out who her father was, and her results showed 50% Yorkshire and 50% Scottish. We knew her mother was from the Yorkshire Dales so we could see where we needed to look for her father. Enid on the other hand had 9% German DNA so when we found a cluster of DNA matches with German ancestry, we knew we needed to pay attention.
DNA Matches
The second section will contain a list of everyone who has also tested and has been found to share some identical DNA with you. From amongst the millions of test results, there will definitely be some people who belong to your extended family. These cousins of varied proximity will form the building blocks – the resource with which you will identify your unknown father.
You will have a differing number of cousins on your list, depending upon where you are. Testing is hugely popular in America so testers there will routinely be matched with thousands of fourth cousins and hundreds of third cousins, and probably tens of second cousins. Discovering the identity of American fathers is consequently much easier, and many DNA detectives cut their teeth on American cases.
In Great Britain and Ireland, testing is still relatively new, so a tester may only be matched with a few hundred fourth cousins and they will be fortunate if they have even one second cousins.
When we worked with Teresa, she had thousands of closely related cousins from Kentucky, whereas Maxine from the West Midlands had only one hundred fourth cousins initially. That has doubled to 200 over a four-year period.
We need to point out that if your father is from those parts of mainland Europe where there is no testing underway (either by law or by fashion), such as Germany and Italy for instance, you are going to struggle to find many matches, and your results will be overrepresented by Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders whose ancestors came from the same place and emigrated in the 19th and 20th centuries but don’t live there any more.
If your father is African, Indian, Vietnamese or similar, then at the moment DNA testing is not the way forward for you, you won’t find helpful DNA matches on your list at all. For you, your search needs to be carried out in a different way.
How do DNA matches help to find my father?
Each platform has a tool that allows you to see not just the people you share DNA with, but who you both also share DNA with at the same time – shared matches. Being able to cluster groups of related cousins together is hugely important.
The breakthrough in identifying your father will come from examining the family trees of those shared DNA matches, your biological cousins, who have chosen to attach one and allow you to see it. By looking at the various family trees belonging to your shared cousins, you should start to notice surnames and geography they have in common. That they have their roots in the same county, that they have ancestors with the names.
This should give you the confidence to look more closely and work out whether and precisely how those people are related to each other. If you discover that Sally, Ted and Gordon are all descended from the Mitchell family of Carlisle in the 1850s then you can make a reasonable assumption that you are too. The skill comes in working out exactly where in the Mitchell family you should place yourself, which stem of the family tree you descend from, and how far down you need to come.
That’s where a DNA genealogist will excel. We will be able to research the Mitchell family, find out who married whom, look for other clusters of DNA matches who are descended from families who married into the Mitchell family and then move down in the next generation and the one after that, getting closer and closer to your grandparents.
You may also need to contact, through the relevant websites, those DNA cousins who do not display a family tree and hopefully ask them to confirm how they fit into the Mitchell family tree.
It can take a long time but eventually, your father will be found.
Finding my birth father without even a name