Is it worth doing DNA test?

[Mikart]

Dh has no idea about his grandparents or further back due to various reasons. Hes now retired and wants to start tracing.
Thinking of using Ancestry...has anyone done DNA with them?

Yes, Ancestry is the best to use if you're looking for info on forebears in the UK, as they have the biggest database, hence more potential matches. It also separates into paternal/maternal (as long as you can identify at least one match) which is useful.

Does he have any idea about names, locations etc?

The biggest problem I've encountered with it is that my close matches seem to have very sparse trees, and that many people don't respond to messages. But if he does a DNA test, there is a very good chance that he'll be matched with a couple of second cousins at least (shared great grandparents) unless they were all only children of course.

Great thanks....we have dates and locations for parents and possibly grandparents. Ancestry have a Black Friday offer on at the moment which is why i thought of it

Yes, definitely worth it. But to make anything of it, you'll need a subscription to do all the searches and build your tree.

You dont need a DNA test to start off with but it helps later, to confirm what you've already done and to open up new lines of enquiry.

So I would do a subscription first, to start the tree and see if you/he enjoys it in the first place. If yes then do the DNA. If not no point in continuing.

My other top tip is to be cautious accepting what you see on Ancestry. There are a lot of inaccurate trees, however the Ancestry algorithms will show you hints from them for good or ill. It is crucial to examine and make sure the logic stacks up. Make your own decisions, dont just follow everyone else's.

And the usual caveat that you may find things you find uncomfortable or upsetting. There's a current thread from a woman who thinks she's found a half-niece that her brother has never mentioned. People have found their parents, grandparents are not biological relatives, etc etc.

Listen to the podcast The Gift on BBC Sounds. It’s full of fascinating stories of what people have found with DNA tests, both happy and sad…

My other top tip is to be cautious accepting what you see on Ancestry. There are a lot of inaccurate trees, however the Ancestry algorithms will show you hints from them for good or ill. It is crucial to examine and make sure the logic stacks up. Make your own decisions, dont just follow everyone else's.

Yes, this 100%. Amazing how many people just copy the 'facts' over from other trees. A good reliable tree will be backed up by evidence sourced from indexes of births, deaths, marriages, census (though you might also need to check that they've included the right data for the right person - many people have my great grandfather, who never married my great grandmother, 'marrying' some random woman in London because he had an unusual name and they've just thought 'that's him'. )

Oh there are plenty of skeletons in dh's family cupboard that we know about!!!

How do they know that the DNA comes from yoru mother or your father if they don't have your mother/father's DNA on file?

We're about to do our DNA - test arrived this week - and one of the reasons is we're very interested in knowing where things come from. We don't have a lot of history on either mum or dad's side for me so it will be really interesting if they say that I am 20% Scottish from my Mum or whatever?

I personally think its a terrible idea if you have children.

People really dont think this through Your DNA is VALUABLE - if it indicates you are predisposed for X disaease that could dramatically increase the cost of your grandchild or childs health insurance if the insurer can access your dna (... and in 20 years they will need private health insurance)

Ancestry and friends business model is not selling you a dna test and a plaform linking you with relatives at a small profit... it is to sell on their company (and your data is the main asset) you grant them rights to use of your dna when you sign up

I don't know much about how they do it @NewCushions . It's something called Sideview technology, which they developed. Initially, when you get your matches, they are labelled Parent One, Parent Two, Shared, and Unassigned. Hopefully you should be able to recognise at least one person as a relative and label them 'maternal' or 'paternal', then everyone in that category, say 'Parent One' can be labelled as being from the m or f side. It's pretty accurate with closer relatives, but can falter as you become more distant.

Ancestry is only accurate if other people in your wider family have also done a DNA test, so it could come up with nothing. If he knows all four grandparents' names, he'd be better off searching for their marriage certificates on FreeBMD and sending away for them on the General Register Office website. The further back you go, chances are you will be able to find them on census records too. That will identify other family members in the household as well.

It is way better to go by the actual official records than trying to piece it together using DNA research. That is more useful if you have a complete blank in your tree and have tried everything else.

I think you can request that they destroy your DNA records, and they promise to do so within 30 days of being asked.
The exception to those if your DNA has already been included in a scientific study, but this is supposed to be anonymised.

"Ancestry is only accurate if other people in your wider family have also done a DNA test, so it could come up with nothing."

Nowadays, I think it might be quite difficult to not come up with wider family who have done an Ancestry DNA test - at least in countries like the UK, USA, Canada, Australia etc. (It's a very different matter though in countries like France or Germany, so if a person is from somewhere like France or Germany then what you say is very true).

For example, my mum has a total of 26,140 matches on Ancestry. 11,584 maternal matches, 11,528 paternal matces, 11 from both sides and 3,017 unassigned.

On the maternal side she has 12 first cousins once removed or second cousins. But on the paternal side she only has two cousins that close, the rest are all third cousins or more distant.

Similarly with my dad. He has 22,135 matches on Ancestry. 10,960 maternal matches, 9,534 paternal matches, 12 from both sides and 1,629 unassigned.

On the maternal side he has 14 first cousins once removed or second cousins once removed and seven on the paternal side.

You can.. but how many people do...

The OP and her DP are only just starting out on their genealogy journey, which is why I suggested they look for BMDs for the DP's immediate ancestors that way.

When you're beginning to research your family tree, you need to do it step by step, backwards one generation at a time, 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents etc until you are more familiar with the records available and know what you are doing. Being overwhelmed by 12,000 5th cousins 7 times removed is not going to help any beginner right at the start.

My advice. Start with the paper work. If he wants to do his family history a DNA test isn't going to produce the interesting information. It'll just give you a bunch of matches which may or may not make sense.

If he's retired I'm guessing he's 50+ so his grandparents would have been born around 1900 or before. This makes it much easier to track through birth, marriage and census records. The census publicly available records now go to 1921 and there's the 1939 register so his parents should be on one or both and this helps to start working out relatives.

A lot of it, you can do for free to a certain extent now (though for accuracy it's better to go through ancestry).

I'm guessing he knows his parents date of birth and roughly where they were born / where they were married.

His starting point is to get hold of their marriage certificate.

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/login.asp

There's a fee to order marriage certificates - I'm guessing they married too late to be one digitalised and part of an ancestry subscription.

This will give his parents father's names. From there you look for a birth of your parents and marriages for their parents remembering that births are indexed with mothers maiden names (or a lack of a married name).

It gets more complex and difficult if there are illegitimate children but it's still doable.

My parents have both done DNA tests but tbh id argue it's only useful in certain situations as a bridge to other information and shouldn't be used as a substitute for the grind of researching through records. (Which I love). It should only be used in addition to.

I've helped research for a friend who didn't know who her grandfather was. DNA helped identify his wider family - but you have to know the techniques of research to be able to pin down and identify him individually and that takes a bit of experience with paperwork anyway. I'd argue to do it properly, DNA is a tool for more advanced research rather than a passing interest otherwise it's really rather meaningless anyway and you won't really understand what the information you've found.

You don't find out about murders and smugglers from DNA! You don't find out about experiences in WW1 from DNA. It doesn't tell you whether they were bakers, spinners, clergy men, soldiers... It just gives you matches and perhaps a tree and little context and certainly no idea whether what other people have shared is accurate or not!

You still should start out by tracking down birth, marriage and death certificates as a starting point then looking on census returns.

In DHs family this revealed that his great grandmother ran off with her husband's cousin - there's other trees on ancestry which don't reflect this because they haven't tracked down these records. DNA would be confusing as they'd be a bunch of matches that don't make sense. The records DID show this up though.

Don't take 'short cuts' do it properly. Then consider the DNA route to fill in gaps / confirm what you already know/ uncover those secrets. It isn't a short cut - it just adds to confusion.

As I say you may need to pay for those few original records if you don't already have them too. (Unless it's a newer record, a digital copy of a birth record is £3 but a marriage certificate is still paper only and is a bit more). Then crack on with censuses.

The census records show my great grandmother with her husband and children in 1881 and 1891. It took DNA testing to show that her younger children, twins born in 1875, were fathered by someone else entirely.

DNA also proved the connection with relatives in the US.

However, I had been researching for 30 years before I did the test and I only did it, after my DM died, because I had a sneaking feeling that my Dad was not my biological father. He is, but his Grandad is the cuckoo in the nest.