After having poor match results from my brother's Y-DNA test (see earlier posts), I decided I should do a DNA test myself. There are several companies that currently offer autosomal DNA testing for genealogy, but Ancestry is the biggest in the industry. Autosomal is the standard DNA that matches all your overall DNA to the overall DNA of others.
Advice from those who have been working with DNA for genealogy for years said if you are going to do only one test, choose Ancestry’s autosomal. The likelihood of finding matches through Ancestry is higher than any other because Ancestry has the largest commercial DNA database. Since my main purpose for doing a DNA test was to find matches, even distant ones, I took the advice and purchased an Ancestry kit.
Ancestry tests aren’t cheap, but they are cheaper than a Family Tree Y-DNA test. I purchased my test at a genealogy conference for a discount. The kit came directly from an Ancestry representative so I didn’t have to pay the extra $20 shipping charge that people who buy on-sale kits online are charged. Be sure to take that shipping charge into account when you are comparing sale prices. There will likely be an asterisk on the sale price noting that shipping is not included.
When I activated the kit online, the estimate for getting results was 6 weeks, but in fact it only took about 3. Activating is the first step. Then you spit into the tube provided and then put the sample into the mail.
To get the most from your results, if you are looking for matches, be sure to select the option to ‘see and be seen’ by your DNA matches when activating your kit. I believe you can go back and reset those options if you don't turn them on when activating.
You should also have a family tree up on Ancestry. (Unless you have real issues with privacy, the tree should be ‘public.’) The tree will let your matches see how they are related to you, and the Thrulines feature will look for people in your tree who appear in the trees of your DNA matches to show you how you are connected. But just because you have a tree attached to your Ancestry research account, doesn’t mean that tree is attached to your DNA results. To do that you must link your tree to your results. That can be done from the top of your DNA results screen. The reason your tree isn't automatically linked to your DNA is that some people have multiple trees on Ancestry. For example, one person may have a tree for themselves and one for their spouse and another for a friend who they are helping research. So Ancestry asks you to choose whether you want to link a tree and which tree to link if you do. Most people have only one tree and it will be for themselves, so that will be the tree they link.
So having done all that, when my test results came back, Ancestry had found 102 DNA matches who were 4th cousins or closer in the DNA database. This is a statistically low number of matches, but not super low. I have friends who have hundreds of 4th-cousin-or-closer matches, and I’ve heard of people having as many as 2,000. But I’ve also read online about people who had as few as 50. I believe typical results are between 100 and 1000, which puts mine at the bottom of the ‘typical’ scale. But this was not a huge surprise since I’d already had a disappointing number of matches from my brother’s Y-DNA test at Family Tree. Apparently my relatives are not big on genealogy in general and DNA testing specifically.
Within a couple of weeks of receiving my results, I’d added one more match who was a 4th-cousin-or-closer, and I am hopeful that number will continue to rise as more people do DNA tests.
To learn more about DNA matches read: http://whoareyoumadeof.com/blog/2017/10/23/accurate-ancestry-dna-matches/
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