any great stories about using ancestry.com DNA analysis?

Parent Cafe
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My friend who was adopted as an infant found his birth father via the ancestry site. He’d had a relationship with his birth mother for years and she never disclosed the name of his birth father to him, if she ever knew (it’s a bit of a mystery - probably best to let some secrets stay hidden after 50+ years!). Anyway, he found the father through a half brother and made contact. The birth father never knew he had another son.

They exchanged pictures. The funniest part? My friend has a rather distinctive mustache, and his birth father has one exactly like it!

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It isn’t like they saved those samples - they essentially paid a lab to analyze them, and the samples are likely long gone. I do certainly have concerns about insurance companies getting access to people’s DNA info. Corporations are not to be trusted to do the “right” thing when there is a profit motive for them, as is repeatedly proven in recent news.

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@intparent, I thought you meant insurance companies could use DNA to decline writing a new policy on you. If they are writing a new policy, they can collect new DNA samples and have them tested, if that is the direction they are going. Once you have a life insurance policy in place, they don’t go back and reunderwrite to try to find reason to cancel it.

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I have done both Ancestry and 23 and Me, and uploaded to several other sites. I don’t know of any adoption situations in my family, but I did discover a couple of second cousins, one on Ancestry, one on 23 and Me, that I couldn’t “place.”

I reached out to them via messaging and email, and learned that both had been conceived with the assistance of an anonymous sperm donor. The little information they each had was similar to the other’s.

Another cousin and I did detective work together and figured out the biological father, who had been a medical student at the time. I don’t think the newfound half-sibs have contacted him yet, but they are thrilled to have found each other!

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To be fair, it confirmed what you thought you knew :wink: There have been people surprised by the results.

For me, though, the more interesting thing has been finding relatives I did not know about. 23andme isn’t as useful as ancestry.com where people can link to a family tree. Some people have built extensive trees.

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I respectfully disagree as to the comparative usefulness of 23andme vs. Ancestry. One big difference–you have to keep subscribing to get new Ancestry matches. On 23andme, you pay once and then get new matches without paying anything additional. Moreover, last I heard, Ancestry doesn’t have a chromosome browser. And Ancestry’s leaf system doesn’t have anything to do with DNA. It can be incredibly misleading. I use the library edition of Ancestry, so I can only see public trees. There are 12 online trees for my father’s family.that have my dad in them. 10 are absolute rubbish. But people copy them and repeat the errors. One of the others is probably right EXCEPT for the fact that my family is included in it. It has my great-grandmother remarrying after her husband’s death and having many more children. My grandmother therefore has about six half siblings in this tree. However, in reality, my great-grandmother isn’t the person in the tree. She just has a very common name, was born in NYC in the same year, and married a man with the same last name, but a different first name.But you’ll get your stupid little leaf on Ancestry because Ancestry doesn’t use DNA to create the leaves. The last tree is partly right and partly wrong. If solves a mystery using a very simply device, a woman with the same name as my ancestor who lived in the same small New England town, is made into my ancestor. However, she was 62 at the time her son was born! I doubt it.

My Heritage’s “Smart Match” has the same issue. But MyHeritage has a chromosome browser.

Hey, seeing someone else’s tree can be VERY helpful. I use them all the time, but I verify and view it as a suggestion until I can verify. I’m currently working on my kid’s spouse’s tree. An extensive tree online at Ancestry has a female ancestor giving birth at the age of 9 and the father as age 8. Um…? I did a quick search on the youngest child–an alleged sibling of my kid’s spouse’s ancestor. He died in World War 1. There’s a newspaper article about his death which gives the names of his parents—not the ones named in the tree.

Anyway, my point is simply don’t assume the trees on Ancestry are all accurate. IME, MOST aren’t.

Switching gears…I’d like to point out that many people have voluntarily given their DNA to 23andme knowing that it will be aggregated and sold to pharmaceutical companies. In part they do this through 23andme’s surveys. You don’t have to answer the questions if you don’t want to do so, but many people are quite willing to do so because they know the answers may help figure out which genes are linked to which conditions.

So, maybe you don’t want anyone to know you have lupus. However, you might be perfectly willing to consent to having your DNA aggregated with that of others with this disease to see if there is a genetic cause and in the hope that if there is, that big ugly pharma company may find the cure. The big ugly pharma company won’t be told your name.

23andme has actually handed out free DNA kits to people who suffer from certain specific diseases.The people who accept the kits and use them are told the purpose is scientific research to find a cure for their disease. I am fairly sure lupus was one of the diseases involved.

So, it’s really not all bad.

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ancestry.com says

Some useful features (including seeing the tree of your match if they have one, and having ancestry.com notify you of a common ancestor found in the linked family trees of both you and your DNA match) are only available with a subscription. But with a one-time purchase a DNA kit you will see new matches the same as you do on 23andme.

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Oh, sorry, that’s a change. It used to be you could see them for some period of time and then you no longer could do so unless you purchased a subscription. Glad to hear that’s change and apologize for being out of date.

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@prodesse -

You may very well be right, which is why I said that he might change his mind as he gets older and, perhaps, has kids of his own. As of now, his view is that his birth parents didn’t want him and he has no interest in finding them. If he chose to discuss it with me, I would tell him that he might not be seeing the full story, but… I also have no clue what his adoptive parents told him and whether there was ever any contact.

My choice was not to share on the site. I used a throwaway email and declined contact from anyone. H. OTOH, has found relatives in many other places that he will never visit.

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Well, we got some remarkable news tonight: DH is 100% Ashkenazi Jewish. Again, yawn!!

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Well, as expected, I’m a mix of British, Irish, French, German, and Scandinavian. What wasn’t expected is that I seem to have a grandparent from the 1770’s who was 100% Congolese. The Congolese timeline overlaps with my Scandinavian timeline. The only explanation I can come up with is that I had slave holding ancestors… Makes one pause.

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While big pharna won’t be told your name, it is pretty obvious that from recent news regarding crime suspects that it would be possible for them or anyone else who got the data to figure it out. So if big pharma shares with someone like UHC or Travelers, suddenly it isn’t so far fetched to think that someone with a profit motive might find it worthwhile to figure out who it belongs to.

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@preironic The islands that are now the US Virgin Islands had been colonies of Denmark. They had their own circular trade of guns/ammo to Africa, slaves to the islands, sugar and rum to Denmark. Any chance of ancestors involved in that circle of hell?

An article in the LA Times describes an African American’s search for where her ancestors may have come from in Africa and the limitations of the her DNA test kit. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-banks-dna-nigeria-20190120-story.html

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@VeryHappy I can imagine it could be a big “yawn” for people that know their heritage with certainty. I always had an idea (Scotland, England, Sweden), and that was confirmed by testing, but it was still interesting to have that confirmed . My grandmothers both died when their children were very young (infant and toddler). and there were some gaps in knowledge and access to some relatives because of that.

I feel for people that are possibly being thrown for a loop with this new testing. Secrets exposed in some cases. I do wonder what can / will happen with sperm or egg donors down the line. There seem to be former medical students, in particular, that may have fathered children and now could be identified? I hope there is more counseling for anonymous sperm and egg donors these days, given the new technology.

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@sevmom: I didn’t mean to put down anyone for whom their news is real news. But for both DH and me, our DNA results just confirmed what we believed – that we were our mother’s and father’s offspring, and they were their parents’ offspring, and so forth. Of course it’s nice to have what we always assumed be correct.

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@evergreen5 Read your post from a while ago: “^The 23andme ancestry service includes the raw data, the exact same raw data as for the health service. That data can then be taken to third party sites for interpretation (e.g. genetic genie, healthcoach7). The 23andme health service itself was never very useful.“

Does this basically mean that the info received with the ancestry-only test is enough to figure out the results of the more expensive “health service”?

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Re: Ancestry, the basic online database: “but I verify and view it as a suggestion until I can verify”
Absolutely need to triple check from several directions, more authoritative than some other person’s guesses.

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So far the tests have just confirmed your DNA has the markers found in those in people who report they are descended from Ashkenazi ancestors. Your parents and their parents and so forth could literally be anybody in that community and you’d be getting the same results you are getting now.

Without directly testing the DNA of your parents or grandparents you can at most build chains to add weight to your belief in who your relatives were but it will always lie below the level of absolute proof. So suppose you and all your siblings are tested and you show up as expected (eg. siblings). That shows you have the same parents but not who those parents were.

You could then add more evidence using family history. A 2nd cousin believed to be related to you thru your maternal grandmother agrees to test and she shows up as a 2nd cousin. This likely shows you each have a grandparent that were siblings (but not which grandparent), and there are other relations (half-sister in the chain, etc) that can give the same percentage of shared DNA.

You can do what is called triangulation in which you show that not only are percentages shared are in the expected range but you can look at actual shared segments; this can prove the shared chain among 3 people is from the same ancestor (called in the jargon “Identical by Descent”). But this still doesn’t show who that ancestor actually is.

Note, too, that the Ashkenazi community and some others are endogamous; people in them tended to intermarry within a relatively small community. If you look at your 23andme report it may say you have thousands of 3rd and 4th cousins. You don’t really, but within a small population there is only so much DNA to go around so you’ll share enough segments to appear as a 3rd cousin even though the segments were not all from the same great-great-grandparent. Search for the article
“No, You Don’t Really Have 7,900 4th Cousins: Some DNA Basics for Those With Jewish Heritage”

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@badgolfer: Thanks. I just read the article. Very helpful!!

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“Note, too, that the Ashkenazi community and some others are endogamous; people in them tended to intermarry within a relatively small community. If you look at your 23andme report it may say you have thousands of 3rd and 4th cousins. You don’t really, but within a small population there is only so much DNA to go around so you’ll share enough segments to appear as a 3rd cousin even though the segments were not all from the same great-great-grandparent. Search for the article
“No, You Don’t Really Have 7,900 4th Cousins: Some DNA Basics for Those With Jewish Heritage”

@badgolfer, I get updates all the time with hundreds of names. Of course, I just ignore them. But, as I reported in this thread early last summer. I found two of my father’s 1st cousin’s (siblings) and their family. We had presumed they all died in the war. My jaw dropped when I saw two extremely close DNA matches with my maiden name.