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Archiver > Scotch-Irish > 2010-05 > 1274990230


From:
Subject: Re: [S-I] Anyone had success with the autosomal DNA thang?
Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 19:57:10 +0000 (UTC)
In-Reply-To: <11c5d.34972055.39302337@aol.com>


Hi Joan,

Thanks for the 'heads up'. It is good to know it does sometimes work. I would think the adoptees might do better to stick with Y or mitochondrial -- otherwise it seems a lot like 'needle in a haystack'. You can't tell if the matching segs are from the lost parents or some much further on back relative. You could be hoping to find dad in Kentucky and you are looking at relatives back in Scotland.....

>My biggest problem with matching based upon autosomal DNA is that most of
>the people tested up to the present with 23andme don't know as much about
>their lineage through traditional research as I do.

Yep, this I noticed too......AND some of these people think it is all about vacuuming up trees from Ancestry and trying to get the biggest number of people "I got 10,000 people in my tree!" Oh, wow, but 99,980 of them ain't related to you at all due to a mistake you haven't found yet.

>One really great aspect of finding cousins (at least for me being female)
>is that I've obtained the Y Haplogroup of some of my male ancestors by
>finding cousins who are straight male descendants of those lines.

This is really important information for those whose lines 'daughtered out'.

>I suspect that now that 23andme has split the testing into genealogical and
> medical that more genealogists with a better paper trail will be tested
>there and those results will be easier to trace.

The two 'offerings' seem very different. I suspect for genealogy the Family Tree DNA stuff will be more feature rich simply because that is their focus. I have one member of the FTDNA group that I admin who is awaiting test results so we shall soon see what it is like. Apparently everyone is finding it very confusing. The DNA genealogy list is full of people trying to sort out how to do this -- and these are the experts.

FTDNA sent admins a free tshirt to those who recruited someone to pay for a pre-release (beta) autosomnal test. Mine came. It's unwearable... I threw it on fast and ran out to tai chi class. There I was in a tshirt ---the front and back said "SEX doesn't matter any more www.family tree DNA." SEX was about 6 inches high. Everyone was looking at me. They really laughed hard when I explained. I had to cancel my shopping...... I will wash it and send it to the Goodwill....Unless someone here wants it <grin>. So it's best to carefully inspect free tshirts carefully. It's not like the one they give you at work. I could not imagine walking into a Kmart into it <grin>.

Lin da Merle

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