Our family is really big into genealogy. My older sister is the expert in my family. My husband is also super involved in the world of DNA. (He has gone to numerous genealogy conferences in the US and attended one in Poland a couple years ago, which he enhanced by taking a two-day tour to areas where his ancestors lived. He also did a virtual [due to COVID] presentation last year for a TV genealogy group and will be doing more in the future.)
Several years ago Dan and I asked our siblings, some aunts and uncles on my side, his daughter, and his mom if they would be willing to test with 23andMe. We then bought kits for all of them with the exception of one sister, who declined. Many of us have also tested with Ancestry and all of us have uploaded our data to Gedmatch.
My sister has been able to fill in a lot of blanks in our family tree as a result. In one case, a gentleman living in Germany who matched me as a cousin wrote to try and identify how we were connected. He did not match with my sister (which is not unusual, since we all get different bits of DNA from our parents) but I told him to write to her because she was the family expert. Turns out he has bibles with all sorts of family history recorded within their pages, which he scanned and sent to sis. The information was super helpful to her. We have also connected with a couple of previously unknown relatives who had been given up for adoption back in the days when out of wedlock pregnancy was a bit more of an issue than it is today!
Dan has had a difficult time tracing his family prior to WW2 because of … you know … Nazis burning towns and killing everyone. Doing DNA testing has been a godsend for him.
Two especially interesting ways DNA has been useful to our family:
(1) Dan was matched as 2nd cousins to several young adults who all matched as half siblings. None of them knew the others. He chatted with one on the phone and finds out the young cousin was a DC (donor conceived) baby, which he had always known. Then other half siblings starting popping up. He chatted with another young lady who had no idea who these people were. Dan asks her if she was DC. She says no, she doesn’t think so. Dan says well, you might want to check with your parents. Needless to say, she was conceived through a donor. Her parents, like most people who used donors to get pregnant, had been told NOT to disclose this information to the child. Little did they know what science would come up with in the 21st century! Dan did figure out which 1st cousin has to be donor. He passed that info along to the 2nd cousins but I don’t think he knows if any of them have contacted their bio dad.
(2) My two sons were born with a neurodegenerative disease called Sanfilippo Syndrome. In order to have a child with the disease both parents have to be carriers. If two carriers have a child, there is a one in four chance that the child will have the disease, two chances out of four that the child will be a carrier, and one chance out of four that the child will be unaffected (neither have the disease nor be a carrier).
23andMe allows you to compare your chromosomes with other people’s. Because Dan researched where the “bad gene” lives (which chromosome), he was able to compare my genes with my siblings’ to determine that two were definitely NOT carriers. This meant that their children were NOT carriers and didn’t have to worry about passing this gene on to their kids and grandkids. Several others ARE carriers. In those cases, we were able to convince their kids (all young adults at this point) to let us send them kits so Dan could try and determine if they are carriers. (If it turns out that they are, they would want to have their partners undergo carrier testing before planning to have a family.)
Obviously, Dan and I do not have concerns about privacy with regard to using these sites.
If you are interested primarily in relative matching, Dan recommends using Ancestry because the potential pool of people is so much larger. Whichever site you use, you can download your data and then upload it to Gedmatch which is a free site. The more pools you fish in, the likelier you are to catch a fish.
There are other sites such as Promethease.com that will give you the type of health info you get with 23andMe, much more detailed than 23andMe’s, in fact. You can upload your 23andMe or Ancestry raw data to Promethease and get an amazing health report for $12.
And, finally, I would offer these warnings to anyone dipping his/her toe into genetic genealogy:
(1) You might find out something you don’t know, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the “thing” and your perspective.
(2) You might not learn much that you didn’t already know.
(3) If you were told growing up that you were part Native American, be prepared to learn that you are not. You wouldn’t believe how many people post online that the tests must be wrong because they were told growing up that their grandma was full-blooded [fill in the blank with tribe].
Good luck with your adventure!
kathy