#How do i see my dna matches on ancestry series#

Written narratives on the website provide a history of each reported region.

Living DNA says that 3.1 percent of my DNA is from Aberdeenshire. I havenвЂ™t yet traced any ancestors to Lincolnshire, but I did find through much genealogical sleuthing that one of my sixth-great-grandfathers came from Aberdeen, Scotland. I found that 22.5 percent of my heritage came from Lincolnshire in east-central England. The company highlights ethnicity on a world map, then lets you zoom in from the continent level. When I saw the companyвЂ™s ad claiming to pinpoint exactly where in the British Isles a personвЂ™s genetic roots stem from, I decided to give it a go. Living DNAДЄnother expensive test ($159) came from Living DNA. The company is less certain about subregional estimates than it is about global estimates. Living DNA ENGLISH ANCESTRY Living DNA offers fine-scale ethnicity estimates for people of British or Irish descent (SaeyвЂ™s results shown). Since I bought the Geno 2.0 kit as an app through Helix, I donвЂ™t know if the kit purchased directly from National Geographic, which is processed by Family Tree DNA, would yield different results. Overall, Geno 2.0 has a nice presentation, but I learned more about my family history elsewhere.

I take geeky pride that 1.5 percent of my DNA comes from Neandertals, topping the 1.3 percent average for Geno 2.0 customers. The service also calculated the percentage of Neandertal ancestry that I carry. So IвЂ™m skeptical that I am actually related to those famous figures, even from the distance of 65,000 years, the last time we supposedly had an ancestor in common.

I donвЂ™t know how National Geographic knows about the mitochondria of Petrarch, Copernicus or Abraham Lincoln. ThereвЂ™s no relative matching, though Geno 2.0 shows which historical вЂњgeniusesвЂќ may have shared your mitochondrial or Y chromosome DNA. Provides no ancestry information within the last 500 years.Specialized for looking into the deep past.That doesnвЂ™t tell me much and doesnвЂ™t reflect what I know of my family history. My results say that 45 percent of my heritage came from people living in southwestern Europe 500 to 10,000 years ago. The results are generic, and the ethnicity categories are overly broad. National Geographic Geno 2.0ДЄt $199.95, National GeographicвЂ™s test is the most expensive, yet the least useful. A heat map indicates where members of your maternal line are most prevalent. MOTHERLINE National Geographic Geno 2.0 shows how a customerвЂ™s maternal line migrated and changed across time, as determined by analyses of mitochondrial DNA. But my user experience, and results, were quite different for each company. Once I sent in DNA samples, my Web-based results arrived in just a few weeks. Neither type of DNA changes that much over time, so those tests usually canвЂ™t tell you much about recent ancestors. In contrast, mitochondrial DNA traces maternal heritage, since people inherit mitochondria, which generate energy for cells, only from their mothers. Y chromosome DNA traces a manвЂ™s paternal line. Some of the companies also analyze a personвЂ™s Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA. SNP matches also help companies see who in their database youвЂ™re related to. To estimate ethnic makeup, a company compares your overall SNP pattern with those of people from around the world. These companies analyze hundreds of thousands of natural DNA spelling variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs.

#How do i see my dna matches on ancestry series#

This story is part of a series on consumer genetic testing.