This is a copy of a post I made to a paid-membership Irish genealogy site (at forum.youririshheritage.com) that I am a member of that describes my experience with genealogy-focused DNA testing. The only update to this is that subsequently, I discovered I could upload my ancestry.com DNA raw data to gedmatch.com in order to see if I could find any additional matches in their database. It turned out I did find two 3rd cousins I was previously unaware of (and was able to exchange emails with them). And yes, I do plan to get involved with genealogy groups here in TV sometime.
Here's that post:
To date I have taken two DNA tests, The first was in 2005 via familytreedna.com. I chose that provider because IBM, my employer, was sponsoring a joint project between familytreedna, National Geographic and IBM to advance the science of DNA testing. As employees, we were given the opportunity to participate at a greatly reduced cost (to kick start the project). I had always been interested in my family origins and so I decided to participate.
At the time I had only a vague notion of where my family had come from. My paternal line, the Cronin's, were clearly from Ireland, although details were hazy at best. My maternal line, the Spurr's, were known (with much greater certainty than my paternal line) to have emigrated from Normandy to England around the time of the Norman Conquest, way back in 1066. So I expected to find that I had mostly Irish and English ancestors.
The results on familytreedna are very detailed, so its difficult to provide a succinct summary, but the chart at the following link gives a reasonably good overview of the probabilities based on an analysis of the matches I have with other test takers in their database. As expected, England, UK and Ireland are prevalent (with some France, which makes sense given the Norman origins of my maternal line). I was a bit surprised by the number of German matches at first, but then I remembered that my paternal Grandmother (named Smith, aka Schmitt) was likely from there, so I guess that makes sense as well.
All in all I was satisfied with the results, at least in terms of the confirmation they provided of the general ideas I had about where my ancestors came from. The results were not very useful in narrowing things down to specific areas (e.g. counties, townlands, etc.) , and that was a bit frustrating, but given the vast computational challenges involved (not to mention the relative dearth of detailed test results for any significant percentage of the population), understandable I suppose.
https://goo.gl/77qcMK
I took the second test in 2013, this time with ancestry.com. In the intervening years between my first and second tests, I had gotten more active trying to narrow things down, particularly on my paternal line. I joined ancestry.com and spent a few years researching my Cronin line.
To make a long story short, I traced my Cronin's back from my childhood home in Massachusetts, USA to my great grandfather's birthplace in Johnville, NB Canada and from there back to my 2nd great grandfather in Ireland. I found his baptism record (from Killarney in 1815) but not much else. There I hit a frustrating brick wall (in terms of finding other Irish ancestors anyway, I was able to find a fair number of Canadian and American relatives, some of whom I have communicated with directly, and that was satisfying).
At that point I decided to try one more DNA test to see if maybe I could narrow things down further. However, the results from the ancestry.com test were nowhere near as detailed as what I had found through familytreedna and that was disappointing (although they did confirm the general patterns found earlier, and that was a small comfort). For what its worth, here's what ancestry.com came up with.
https://goo.gl/0FssRt
All in all, my experience was reasonably satisfying in terms of providing a fairly crisp understanding of the general areas my ancestors were from, but beyond that I've not found them particularly useful to get any specifics. Both services did provide a matching service to identify others whose test results were similar to mine, but none of those has turned up any actual direct relatives. So, while it was interesting to see who they were and where they were from, it was not of any use in helping break through my brick wall.
For the moment I've given up on that. I need some kind of breakthrough. I am considering travelling to Ireland and spending some quality time in the general areas I believe my 2nd great grandfather's family to have been from (but even then, given the paucity of records from that time period in Ireland, I'm not particularly hopeful that I'll find much, but at least I'll get to see the area).
I hope this has been useful to you all.
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Bob C