Ancestry DNA Help

I had my DNA tested. They said my family tree had no branches! Seriously, my brother was tested through National Geographic. Instead of the 75% Portuguese and 25% Spanish we thought we are the results came back 38% Iberian Peninsula, 12% Italian and some French, English, and others. My brother was so ugly when he was born mom left him on the church steps. They brought him back!
 
I'm on Family Tree DNA (FTDNA)... I don't know how it works on Ancestry, but on FTDNA it matters how deep you're testing. If you only test the basic level of markers, the information is going to be more "blurry" and the connections more hypothetical; a deep test (which, of course, costs more) gets you better accuracy and certainty.
You seem to be discussing the FTDNA y-DNA test. Ancestry's test is autosomal, and only has one type of testing.

Nope, his DNA would be the same as yours... except for the 23rd chromosome pair (X/Y) that determines gender.
This is incorrect. Siblings only share on average 50% of their DNA. You inherit half of your DNA from each parent - not the same half. Autosomal testing would produce many thousands of different cousin matches, and people are constantly on the Ancestry forums complaining that their siblings have wildly different ethnicity results. This is because the ethnicity results are based on comparing your DNA to a sample population, and two siblings' DNA can be very different. That makes the ethnicity prediction not very useful.

There may be a tiny variation there but not a terribly large one; plus, with his DNA, you can do a Y-DNA test that goes back along the father-to-son (family name) line.

You and he could equally do a mitochondrial test that goes back on the mother-daughter line (we get our mitochondrial DNA from our mothers, so he has the same as you do... but any children he has will have his wife's instead of his/yours).


ETA With respect to MRB's post, yes, if the test isn't terribly accurate, testing you against your brother would be a pretty good check on it... though I wouldn't spend a lot of money on it!
Having a brother do a y-DNA test could definitely be useful, but mostly in cases where there are questions about the direct paternal line. Because y-DNA is passed down essentially unchanged from father to son except for mutations, it can be useful for tracking down male adoptees, or sorting out which "Jones" family is the one your father came from.

Both y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA can give you distant information about your family - but only on a single line.
 
This is incorrect. Siblings only share on average 50% of their DNA. You inherit half of your DNA from each parent - not the same half. Autosomal testing would produce many thousands of different cousin matches, and people are constantly on the Ancestry forums complaining that their siblings have wildly different ethnicity results.

:redface: I think I've just exposed my shaky understanding of cellular biology. :laugh:
 
My brother just did this! Independently of him, I was looking into signing up on Ancestry, so that was funny timing. (Or WAS it :O o: ... *cue suspenseful music*).

Not being on Ancestry yet, I can only guess...perhaps they keep their trees private simply to reduce the number of total strangers who might otherwise contact them. If you have a family link, you would not be a total stranger. So I think they would not think you were rude for contacting them. They can always choose not to respond.

I once tracked down a family ~ complete strangers ~ because my sister found their great grandfather's keys in an old house that she purchased. :smile: They were shocked to hear from me but pretty happy to get those keys back.

Maybe. I have no idea if my brother has created a tree yet or not (I literally just discovered yesterday that he had the DNA test done.). Out of all of us, I would be the most likely to get that going. I could see him just wanting an ethnicity breakdown.

Maybe that's why he sent me his DNA results...giving me a little nudge. :cautious:

Okay, now I have a question...given the nature of this DNA test, I don't really need to have it done, do I? He and I have the same parents, grandparents, etc. Wouldn't my numbers come up the same?
I contacted a distant cousin and she was delighted! Through that contact, I have met many distant cousins, learned more about my family's history, and have attended two family reunions.
 
One tip bout locked and no-tree matches: you can still see the "shared matches" for these trees. Sometimes the shared matches feature vanishes due to a bug and you have to reload the page, so if you don't see it for a particular match, reload. You can use shared matches to "peek" at these trees, if your locked match has several shared matches who do have trees. "Oh, this person has no tree but three of our shared matches are on my Landrum line, she must be related to the Landrums."

The shared match list is also a great tool for figuring out where to start looking for shared ancestors. For example, I had a match whose shared match list included one that I had a shaky leaf hint for - I knew the shared ancestor was a Bledsoe. The match I was looking at had misread the name she found on a family Bible, believing that her gg-grandmother's maiden name was "Bledson," but knowing that I was looking for a Bledsoe match, I was quickly able to find a sister of one of my Bledsoe ancestors who disappeared after a certain date but whose first name and date of birth matched her "Bledson." Armed with the wedding information from her Bible, I was able to find a marriage certificate connecting the dots, then a death certificate which she had overlooked because the married name was misspelled on the original record and the maiden name was different from what she expected, and then the death certificate led to finding the correct grave. It was a win-win situation - I found out what had happened to my Bledsoe aunty, who I had previously incorrectly assumed died in childhood, and she found out who her gg- grandfather's parents were, when she died, and where she was buried!
 
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Having traced everyone back to at least the 1700s, and finding no hard evidence of Native Americans despite family legends, I have so far opted not to be tested. I know I'm English, Welsh, Irish and Scots, but I guess the percentages would be interesting.
I think that goes for most of us in the southern states.
 
Have a question. My mother's people are very, very ancient on her maternal side. At the time of European contact they were already small bands isolated in the crevices of really tall mountains surrounded by really violent rivers. Even Indians didn't get in there! There are three main tribes who occupied maybe two or three villages at their peak and our family is the last of the Mohicans. How do you get a base group for testing from a pool like that?
 
Have a question. My mother's people are very, very ancient on her maternal side. At the time of European contact they were already small bands isolated in the crevices of really tall mountains surrounded by really violent rivers. Even Indians didn't get in there! There are three main tribes who occupied maybe two or three villages at their peak and our family is the last of the Mohicans. How do you get a base group for testing from a pool like that?
You send someone from Ancestry to ask really, really nicely.

As I understand it, Ancestry's "Native American" DNA is mostly taken from South American samples and does not represent any North American tribes very well. Some people who have North American tribal blood seem to be having it labeled as Asian, which makes sense since supposedly the first people migrated here from Asia when there was still a land bridge.

Because a lot of tribes are suspicious of anything that smells like the government testing them, supposedly it has been difficult to persuade many people to get tested. I think also some people are afraid someone will start requiring DNA evidence for tribal membership and benefits. I read an article about Kennesaw Man which talked about how the team got tribal permission for their testing - first, the research team were Europeans, so that was a plus, they didn't have the stink of the US gov't on them, and second, they went and talked to the Colville tribal elders and even flew some of them to their lab to show them exactly what was being done. They started out respectful and they got a good response. Hopefully others will learn from them.

In your case, your mom is the exact sort of person they test for the sample group. The companies would probably pay her to test if they knew about her!
 
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You send someone from Ancestry to ask really, really nicely.

As I understand it, Ancestry's "Native American" DNA is mostly taken from South American samples and does not represent any North American tribes very well. Some people who have North American tribal blood seem to be having it labeled as Asian, which makes sense since supposedly the first people migrated here from Asia when there was still a land bridge.

Because a lot of tribes are suspicious of anything that smells like the government testing them, supposedly it has been difficult to persuade many people to get tested. I think also some people are afraid someone will start requiring DNA evidence for tribal membership and benefits. I read an article about Kennesaw Man which talked about how the team got tribal permission for their testing - first, the research team were Europeans, so that was a plus, they didn't have the stink of the US gov't on them, and second, they went and talked to the Colville tribal elders and even flew some of them to their lab to show them exactly what was being done. They started out respectful and they got a good response. Hopefully others will learn from them.

In your case, your mom is the exact sort of person they test for the sample group. The companies would probably pay her to test if they knew about her!

Thanks! This is intriguing. I do know some tribes are kicking around the DNA testing for membership but I think they shouldn't kick it around too much - I know, being an elder myself, that at least three of our 'full-bloods' are actually Hawaiian and/or another neighboring tribe, or have a miner in the woodpile. If they want to use it to boot people out, they'd better quietly check themselves first! There was a lot of raiding and intermarriage. Mom's people weren't easy to catch - even the people on the other side of the mountain couldn't get to them. Their whole empire was 20 miles long by 2 miles wide.

We've always said around here, from a very long time ago, that we weren't related to the people south of us - meaning Mexico on down. In fact, some anthropologists think older tribes may not be related to anybody in California, at least below the Cascades. The Gold Rush kicked the card house all to pieces - I wonder what could be found at this point in time?
 
@Allie there's also another reason it's hard to get DNA and other testing from Native people. If you have something personal, you can do bad medicine on them. Something physical like spit or blood or anything like that is very guarded lest some devil person get ahold of it. I know there are still people who will pick up every scrap of food their relations have left on a plate so an enemy won't put a whammy on the whole fan damily! Napoleon Chagnon was an anthropologist who studied the very isolated and remote Yanomamo people on the Orinoco River and took a large number of blood samples and other physical items. The descendants of his study subjects are attempting the return of those samples because Chagnon wasn't fully truthful - the donors believed he would be returning them after study. Instead, they've been kept. The descendants are claiming these samples must be returned as most of the donors have passed and cannot go onward - they are forest spirits because they aren't complete without those things that were collected.

It gets complicated!
 
Have a question. My mother's people are very, very ancient on her maternal side. At the time of European contact they were already small bands isolated in the crevices of really tall mountains surrounded by really violent rivers. Even Indians didn't get in there! There are three main tribes who occupied maybe two or three villages at their peak and our family is the last of the Mohicans. How do you get a base group for testing from a pool like that?
I think you will have to ask James Fenimore Cooper.
 
By any chance do you wear dentures? That is a big known problem. Denture adhesive seems to destroy the samples.
The real problem stems when I had experimental cancer surgery in 1986.since I HD wide spread cancer of the throat the doctors removed everything from the back of my tongue all the to my stomach and then pulled my stomach up to the back of my tonque.as a result you can see my stomach if you look into my mouth so it is always full of gastric juices and we could not collect a proper sample of saliva that they could test.
 
The real problem stems when I had experimental cancer surgery in 1986.since I HD wide spread cancer of the throat the doctors removed everything from the back of my tongue all the to my stomach and then pulled my stomach up to the back of my tonque.as a result you can see my stomach if you look into my mouth so it is always full of gastric juices and we could not collect a proper sample of saliva that they could test.
I can see how that might be a problem! I'm glad you're still with us!
 
I can see how that might be a problem! I'm glad you're still with us!
They gave me 3 to 6 months to live back then but I fooled them long enough to to see 4 grandkids and 1 great grandkids on the way.they used to check me out every two months for over three years to see what they did wrong since I survived and all the others were failures.i told them it wasn't them it was the man or lady upstairs that saw to it.amen.
 
Chiming in about whether to contact people with "private trees". I suppose there is a slightly different reason why each person chooses to have their tree private or not but here is mine. When I first started on ancestry I had a private tree because I didn't want anyone to see my research. As I got more comfortable with what I was doing and was sure of my work I made it public hoping to hear from other "cousins". I did connect with several with some interesting information exchanged. I recently made my tree private again because quite frankly I got quite tired of people grabbing several documents/pictures from my tree without the courtesy of responding to an inquiry from me to chat about our mutual ancestry. So in making my tree private I am hoping that people WILL contact me so we can share.

I certainly don't mean to be off putting with my response but when you have traveled great distances to get headstone pictures and saved your money to purchase many of the documents I have obtained I feel its the least someone can do is say hi while they pick through your research cousin or not :wink:
 
And one last thing, once you link your family tree and get cousins what's up with all the people who went through the expense and trouble of running the test but never creating a family tree? :stomp: Most of the 2nd cousin matches don't have trees and haven't logged on in a few years. Do people only do the test to see their ethnic heritage? :frown:

I know a fair number of folks who have done the DNA test to learn ethnic origins but who have no interest in genealogy.
 
And one last thing, once you link your family tree and get cousins what's up with all the people who went through the expense and trouble of running the test but never creating a family tree? :stomp: Most of the 2nd cousin matches don't have trees and haven't logged on in a few years. Do people only do the test to see their ethnic heritage? :frown:
I have been considering doing this simply out of curiosity about just that, but I have no particular interest in contacting distant relatives. I did a lot of the genealogy back in the '60s and early '70s, and had solidly documented a few thousand individuals. ALL of the results of that were lost in a fire about 20 years ago (along with all my other stuff -- including family photos, decades of notes and files, and original documents dating back to the 1590s:bye: --sort of knocked the stuffing out of me emotionally, as you can well guess). All I have left is my memory of what I found and where I found it (which, so far, has been pretty good, I think). I don't have the time, the energy, the money, or, frankly, the spirit to do it all over again.

On another note, I have also considered it for my son, who is adopted -- if he should ever express an interest (he is mildly curious). His was an international adoption, by the way, and it's interesting to note that in some countries adoption records are open. We already have the names of his birth parents, and maternal grandparents (they're in the adoption records) -- a good starting place if he ever wants to trace it (my ex-wife, his mother finds that a frightening thought, for some reason). [BTW: He also has to keep away from Brazil until he's over 35, or he might find himself conscripted -- they say it's a real danger, we were warned even by people at the Brazilian Consulate.]
 
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