The reason to go to a Mormon/LDS Family History Center is that you can access ancestry.com for free from their computers. You can print stuff or save to a thumb drive.
I appreciate that capability since I do my genealogy on the cheap.
My local center could not help me order anything in from Salt Lake. I basically got a blank look. I didn’t push for it; they’re a tiny center & very friendly so I just take what I can get.
My paternal grandfather’s ancestors “came from England.” Yeah, that’s where they got on the boat. It is not where they originated and had lived. But aiui, they did spend a few months living there, first.
It sometimes helps trace family if you look into siblings (who might have records and clues) or other known collateral relatives. I was able to trace this gf by looking at the man I suspected/hoped was his gf or ggf, then the sibs, their kids, etc, and found a definite link. The suspect turned out to be my gf’s grandfather’s brother. I personally call this “circling wide.”
Libraries often have Ancestry.com also.
“In my experience, for Ashkenazi Jews you don’t get countries. Ashkenazim is/are (?) a sort of country in and of itself (themselves?).”
Right, usually. Ashkenazi Jews are a distinct ethnicity that shared language/culture/intermarriage patterns with one another even as they were scattered across many Gentile countries/language groups. For the most part, Gentile Romanian speakers (for example) weren’t marrying Gentile Lithuanian speakers, and they would be unlikely to have any recent lineage in common. But Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews anywhere in Eastern Europe were part of the same tribe.
Our whole family did DNA testing a couple years back. Most with 23andMe and several people also did Ancestry. My DNA shows 99.8% European with most being English/Irish. My husband is a little more interesting. We also were able to have his father tested before he died so we have that data. FIL had a significant amount of Eastern European DNA (from Czechoslovakian ancestors) but none of that DNA has come down to my children. Unfortunately it washed out. My husband’s Native American DNA from his mother’s side did show up too. It is all fascinating.
I received my report from 23and me and in no particular order I am Native American, Iberian, Asian, Ashkenazi Jew, Middle Eastern/Sub Saharan African, British, Italian and Indigenous Papa New Guinea
My sister had her DNA done by 23andme and was very disappointed when it just came back 96.8% Ashkenazy Jewish – no countries listed at all. She followed up with 23andme to ask why and they didn’t really have a good answer.
I’m curious now – I am allegedly German Jewish and DH is allegedly Russian Jewish. I wonder then if our DNA results will be pretty much the same. Not very helpful, IMO.
My DIL told me a story the other day- that a friend of hers and his husband each did a 23and me test,and each discovered they had a half sibling they didn’t know about.
“She followed up with 23andme to ask why and they didn’t really have a good answer.”
How strange. The answer is so simple. The Ashkenazi lived separately from the non-Jews in each country, but associated with (and to some extent married) one another across those borders.
@VeryHappy Tell your sister to see if she can upload her raw data to one of the other companies and see if their reference population gives her more information. There is usually a small fee. I got a slightly different analysis on FTDNA than on Ancestry.
@Hanna, that basically was their answer, but she wanted to know, for example, whether her ancestors were from Poland or Germany or Russia, which other people who are not Ashkenazy Jews seem to be able to find out.
Does it bother anyone else that being Jewish is now something that can be determined by DNA testing? During WWII, a few Jews hid from the Nazis, sometimes in plain sight. Hitler’s modern equivalent could simply test everyone’s spit and no one would be able to hide.
Thanks, @prodesse. I’ll suggest she look into it.
“which other people who are not Ashkenazy Jews seem to be able to find out.”
Right, because Polish speakers or Czech speakers share a common heritage with one another that corresponds somewhat to geographic areas. Yiddish-speaking Jewish heritage does not correspond to any country, then or now. They answered her question. It sounds like she doesn’t understand the history if she doesn’t see why their answer is the answer.
Which country Ashkenazi Jews are from varies depending on when they were born. Borders changed and what may be in Ukraine now,for example, may have been in Poland then, or vice-versa.
I agree that borders change, but that was true for my Protestant German relatives as well. I just find it unhelpful and wrong to lump my Hungarian relatives near Budapest with people who lived nearly 1,000 miles away in Moscow.
It might be unhelpful, but the companies can’t provide more information than your genes do. As of now, there is no meaningful way (at least according to the science that the site relies on) to reliably distinguish genetically between people of Eastern-European Jewish ancestry who came from a variety of countries.
Let’s put it this way. If you DNA tested English colonists in Virginia and English colonists in Massachusetts in 1750, would you see a genetic difference? No, because those locations were outposts of the same ethnic group. That’s true of the Ashkenazi, too. They were immigrants to Eastern Europe who formed what amounted to colonies.
“I just find it unhelpful and wrong to lump my Hungarian relatives near Budapest with people who lived nearly 1,000 miles away in Moscow.”
I’m not sure how a pattern of scientific data can be “wrong,” unless you mean that it’s incorrect. The DNA reflects an ethnic, cultural, and linguistic reality. If your relatives were assimilated in Hungary, spoke Hungarian, etc., that was probably a recent development. If they had intermarried with Hungarians, you’d see it in the DNA, so they were clearly separate from ethnic Hungarians in that sense.
The DNA is telling you the same thing Ashkenazi literature and history would tell you: these people were Jews first, and they had more contact with other Ashkenazi 1000 miles away than they had with the local Gentiles.
Okay, I just got my results back for ancestry only from 23nme. 99.9% northern European (no surprises there). I can see some from Norway/Finland area (hence those Vikings that brought the Dupuytren’s to us!). No sign of any unknown sibs, at least on their site, but I do see a second cousin that has the same name as my great uncle, that is the closest relative. And… I have more Neanderthal DNA than 95% of the population. 
@VeryHappy, I get why it feels uncomfortable to have the information about Jewish ancestry so easily accessible but it is a historical misconception to think that it was easily possible for Jews to hide from Nazis in plain sight - the few people who survived being hidden were usually well and properly hidden, and only a tiny number of children were able to pull off hiding in plain sight, and a lot of them were found out, too.
In rural societies, everyone knew everything about everyone, including how many children they were supposed to have had, and very few gentiles in Europe cared about helping Jews to hide as it was. (Denmark stands out proud as the one country were almost everyone was helped to escape, but hiding so many wouldn’t have worked. In Eastern Europe, hardly anyone was interested in helping). With public records in Europe going back centuries, the Nazis had most everyone sussed out without needing recourse to genetics.
It was active hostility on the part of most people and passive denial on the part of the few righteous ones that was deadly, not the information. The one thing we can do is work for a society that wouldn’t hurt or kill people based on their ethnicity, ever.
@VeryHappy, I want to make you aware that anyone who is AshkenaziJew has a decent chance of having Factor XI Deficiency, a mild bleeding disorder. My MIL, husband, and all three kids have it. They used to call it Hemophilia Type C, but have gotten away from that term since the disorder is not as severe as “regular” hemophilia. People who have it don’t START bleeding easier, but once it begins, clotting doesn’t happen as it should. Someone having their tonsils or teeth removed often have problems. That’s how we found out about it - when DS was 7, he had bleeding after his tonsillectomy. The disorder is so rare in the general population that it took over a year to diagnose. When they found out about my husband’s Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, everything made sense.
Internal bleeding after an accident is probably the biggest worry, though, since if a person didn’t know he/she had the disorder it could be disastrous. It’s an odd disorder - the severity can vary over a person’s lifetime. Just because it hasn’t been a problem in the past doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. 
Earlier I wrote about a friend who was snubbed by someone related from her Ancestry.com test. She then sent in the 23&me and got some new names. After contacting another half-sister, the half-sister promised to investigate and call her back. She followed through, remembering her parents separated for a short time during her childhood. Now my friend found out her birthfather is still alive and she has 4 half sisters. They haven’t told the father, yet, but the original sister, who was rude to my friend, called her before Christmas to wish her a merry Christmas.
The father and one of the sisters just happen to live in the same town where my friend went to college. Also, several are involved in the computer business, just like my friend.
All of this started because my friend wanted to know her ancestry. She had no clue that her father really wasn’t her biological father. Both her parents have passed away.