Best company to use for African continent

[Ulezz]

I read somewhere that it is better to use certain companies for tracing heritage in certain continents.
I know my heritage is of Arabian descent, did a test with my heritage and it’s just thrown up a region in the south of Africa, it could be correct but the views online seemed to suggest that it’s common for my heritage to be slightly off with reading from the African continent.
Any suggestions or advice would be great, thank you

[RandomGeocache]

I think you mean a DNA test rather than a company with genealogical records?

My advice would always be to test with Ancestry first. Two reasons - they have the biggest UK based database so you are more likely to get matches here, and also because they allow you access to your raw DNA data (just strings of numbers) so that you can then upload it to My Heritage, Gedmatch, family tree DNA and see if you have extra matches there. If you test with other companies, you can't upload to Ancestry.

The "ethnicity estimates" which tell you where your ancestors came from is ever only an estimate and will depend on so many factors. It also depends on who else has been tested and the number of test takers in each area. Lots of people in Britain/Ireland have tested so Ancestry could point to a specific region of the UK - so DH's paternal side strongly indicates NE Scotland, mine is Northumberland/SE Scotland. Fewer people have tested in Africa in general as many cultures take a different approach to genealogy/ancestry - why take a DNA test when you know your ancestors have lived in the same place for century, and there's a strong oral tradition of history and storytelling about people? Same is true in other areas to be fair, I have very few Scottish matches because the family have been here for generations and don't have those "where are we from" questions like people from Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand.

The other difficulty is that many records are not online from Africa and it will depend on the area/country whether records were kept in paper form in the first place. Family Search has a really good Wiki by country where you can see what's online by country

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Browse_by_Country

[Ulezz]

Thank you this is great info!