Anyone taken one of those DNA tests.....

JanekLubanski

.....to find out where in the world their predecessors came from.....and regretted it!

Stratavarious

Not me.. its silly giving it it away. But my uncle did. We have some Spanish, from shipwrecked Armada sailors we believe, that entered the local community and married. I like Spain so no issues or regrets with that. Probably why i like guitar We are all from the same predecessors at the end of the day.

MagicPigDetective

Yes. 98% Welsh, as expected, no surprises, no regrets. 

Whitecat

Nope.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/16/dna-hugely-valuable-health-tech-privacy

Sassafras

No, but Jeremy Kyle tried to get me to take a lie detector test even though I swore I never touched those sheep.

thecolourbox

We bought one for my partner's dad, as he was adopted as a baby and never knew his father. He did it last year, and as of last week, he now knows who is father was and has been speaking to his cousin who never knew he existed, they are massively into family history and were very excited to discover a new branch on the tree that they were not aware of.

Unfortunately it turns out his dad actually died a few months after he was born, he drowned trying to row back to the navy ship he was stationed on in Pembrokeshire after he'd stayed ashore for too long. Quite sad really, but fascinating stuff she now he finally knows at the age of 74 who his dad was.

Edit: bit spooky or just coincidence, but I proposed to my partner on a beach in Pembrokeshire, and on the night as a celebration we ate at a restaurant in Milford Haven on our way back to our accommodation. Which was the beach where my father in law's dad's dad was found after having drowned. 

Sassafras

Wouldn't it be awful if you found out you were related to Hitler!

axisus

I can't see why you would regret it, other than ultimately thinking it a waste of money.

slacker

Having watched a episode of Vera where someone found out his dad wasn't his dad and his actual dad didn't want him and his not dad killed him by accident...no.

Sassafras

axisus said:

I can't see why you would regret it, other than ultimately thinking it a waste of money.

You wouldn't even slightly regret being related to Hitler?
I'd worry about inheriting the insanity gene.

thecolourbox

slacker said:

Having watched a episode of Vera where someone found out his dad wasn't his dad and his actual dad didn't want him and his not dad killed him by accident...no.

I'd say that was more a warning not to watch Vera to be honest

sev112

thecolourbox said:

We bought one for my partner's dad, as he was adopted as a baby and never knew his father. He did it last year, and as of last week, he now knows who is father was and has been speaking to his cousin who never knew he existed, they are massively into family history and were very excited to discover a new branch on the tree that they were not aware of.

Unfortunately it turns out his dad actually died a few months after he was born, he drowned trying to row back to the navy ship he was stationed on in Pembrokeshire after he'd stayed ashore for too long. Quite sad really, but fascinating stuff she now he finally knows at the age of 74 who his dad was.

Edit: bit spooky or just coincidence, but I proposed to my partner on a beach in Pembrokeshire, and on the night as a celebration we ate at a restaurant in Milford Haven on our way back to our accommodation. Which was the beach where my father in law's dad's dad was found after having drowned. 

How do they work out specifics, I thought they just told you that you are 1/64 Alaskan or something at that kind of accuracy.  How do they tell you specific people?

skullfunkerry

I've got an older sister somewhere who I've never met so I did a test, just on the random offchance that she'd have done one (with the same company) too... no joy on that, and nothing particularly unexpected in any of the other data either.

I've since read stuff about health data, privacy etc. that I've got to admit in my wide-eyed naivety hadn't even occurred to me, so I haven't done any other tests. I really should register my details with the adoption agency though, so that if she's registered too they can put us in touch

MagicPigDetective

sev112 said:

thecolourbox said:

We bought one for my partner's dad, as he was adopted as a baby and never knew his father. He did it last year, and as of last week, he now knows who is father was and has been speaking to his cousin who never knew he existed, they are massively into family history and were very excited to discover a new branch on the tree that they were not aware of.

Unfortunately it turns out his dad actually died a few months after he was born, he drowned trying to row back to the navy ship he was stationed on in Pembrokeshire after he'd stayed ashore for too long. Quite sad really, but fascinating stuff she now he finally knows at the age of 74 who his dad was.

Edit: bit spooky or just coincidence, but I proposed to my partner on a beach in Pembrokeshire, and on the night as a celebration we ate at a restaurant in Milford Haven on our way back to our accommodation. Which was the beach where my father in law's dad's dad was found after having drowned. 

How do they work out specifics, I thought they just told you that you are 1/64 Alaskan or something at that kind of accuracy.  How do they tell you specific people?

In the case of Ancestry.co.uk, it provides a list of those sharing similar DNA, (if they’ve also taken a test) ranked in closeness, eg close family, 1st cousin, 2nd cousin. It works as it's linked me correctly to my aunt and cousins. You can contact the matches directly for more info. You can also look at a matches family tree, if they've made one on the site. Linking these matches and researching your family tree using the data on the site is very rewarding. 

thecolourbox

sev112 said:

thecolourbox said:

We bought one for my partner's dad, as he was adopted as a baby and never knew his father. He did it last year, and as of last week, he now knows who is father was and has been speaking to his cousin who never knew he existed, they are massively into family history and were very excited to discover a new branch on the tree that they were not aware of.

Unfortunately it turns out his dad actually died a few months after he was born, he drowned trying to row back to the navy ship he was stationed on in Pembrokeshire after he'd stayed ashore for too long. Quite sad really, but fascinating stuff she now he finally knows at the age of 74 who his dad was.

Edit: bit spooky or just coincidence, but I proposed to my partner on a beach in Pembrokeshire, and on the night as a celebration we ate at a restaurant in Milford Haven on our way back to our accommodation. Which was the beach where my father in law's dad's dad was found after having drowned. 

How do they work out specifics, I thought they just told you that you are 1/64 Alaskan or something at that kind of accuracy.  How do they tell you specific people?

I'm not sure if they are all the same types of tests to be fair. This one was via Ancestry.com, so it told him a little bit about where his DNA comes from (Scottish, bit of Staffordshire, little bit French, etc etc) but then if you register your results on their site they search for similar matches and suggest their possible relation to you. He found some more distant cousins on his mom's side fairly quickly but he knew of them already, but then it came up with one very close match (it said either first or second cousin I think) and that person had no links to dad whatsoever so they exchanged a few messages and worked out who it must have been as that family had done their own trees quite far back and were proper into it.

The person he matched with was actually the daughter of his cousin, her dad being the son of the sister of the man they believe is my father in law's dad. This daughter looks very similar to my partner to be honest, remarkably so. They were pretty certain it must be this chap as he lived in Birmingham at the time and was in the navy, and there was a lot of evidence for him being the stereotype of "a girl in every port". When he drowned he'd been visiting a girl on the coast, he was engaged to a girl in London, a few other things like that, which ties in certainly.

axisus

Sassafras said:

axisus said:

I can't see why you would regret it, other than ultimately thinking it a waste of money.

You wouldn't even slightly regret being related to Hitler?

Honestly. No. There are people related to him but that doesn't make anything inherently wrong with any of them.

WiresDreamDisasters

Yeah I did one recently through 23andme. I was more curious about the genetic predispositions for diseases, but the ancestry stuff is cool too.

So in the last 200 years, my ancestors seem to be 100% British & Irish.




Which makes sense as I have a bunch of family in Ireland, particularly Cork, and my grandmother on my dad's side was Irish. My mums side is the Northern contigent.

My mum has done a good amount of her side of the family tree and has traced a lot of it back to Lancashire, and when my grandad on my dad's side did the family tree, he apparently had it going back quite a long time; and he traced it to the Plantagenet family. I've never gotten a proper look at any of it though. Seems interesting; one day I'll try and mash it all together into one Ancestry file and have it safely backed up for the younglings - as long as Darth Vader doesn't murder them in an owl sanctuary.

further

My wife and I dd one a couple of years ago,  proved my father wasn't.

Strat_a_tat_tat

Sassafras said:

I'd worry about inheriting the insanity gene.

Errrr.... as my mum used to say to me: "If you can't say something nice - say nothing at all."
So I guess I'll just say nothing.  :-)

MattBanshee

My aunt did one recently. Turns out her dad, who had always said he was an only child and his parents were dead, had lied - his dad was a devout Jewish millionaire and he'd been thrown out and disowned for philandering (and had three previous divorces before meeting her mother), and there's an entire filthy rich Jewish side to the family still around that we didn't know about and they didn't know about our branch either.

TheOtherDennis

One thing I've never seen in programmes about this sort of thing.

"We've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is we've found a family member you may not know about."

"Oh wow! That's amazing!"

"Yes, well, it's also the bad news - he's currently doing a 35-to-life stretch for murder."

They always seem to keep that one quiet, but somebody must be related to those guys.