Ancestry Tests

[mateinone]

Long time no speak, but this topic is of a fair bit of interest to me as it is a bit of a hobby of mine.

I have done a number of people's DNA for them and done a lot of research. The ethnicity side is literally just a "fun" thing, it is basically irrelevant, but the actual DNA matching can have some quite amazing results, depending on how far back you go and how much time and effort you put into it.

I was able to find my grandfather on my father's side through a connection with a 3rd cousin once removed on Ancestry and a second cousin twice removed on MyHeritage, well that an a lot of detective work, but it was quite cool, to eventually get to know the history of this side of the family, to provide my mum with photos as and to finally confirm the connection through asking someone on my grandfather's side of the family to take a test. But I have so far helped find missing dad's, cousins, sisters etc, so it can be quite rewarding in helping people connect.

My own the journey was crazy, my father's side in particular were connections with DNA (and public records) back to the 4th President of the USA ( James Madison), but also to a number of families who had written family history books, which once I came across these were really amazing. The oldest public record I could find was a connection to a family member living in Norwich in the UK in the 900s, but it is quite difficult around this era, because really public records are limited to landowners mainly, but honestly all of that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Also if researching your Irish heritage it can be particularly difficult because a lot of public records were burnt, but what you can do when you believe you have matches is actually contact specific parishes in the regions and ask them to confirm records..
So let's say your 5x Great Grandparents traveled to Australia (let's say Port Fairy as that was a common destination for Irish immigrants) in 1850 or so, they will appear on birth certificates for their children (born from 1853) as well as their death certificates, but you will need to check their parish (usually death certificate is a really good place for this) to get the parish they were from in Ireland to get more details.

Anyway that is already so much info, but overall I would strongly suggest that it is worth getting your dna done (I suggest Ancestry purely because a number of sites .. my heritage/gedmatch/familydna etc) allow you to upload your ancestry DNA file to their database for matches, but ancestry doesn't give you the same option.

It can be a lot of fun, but also time consuming and you have to be prepared to know you could be shocked by your results if you start digging.

There are great communities out there to help as well. I done most of my research with English, Irish, USA, Victoria and Tasmanian records, with just a little overlap into NSW and Germany, by far the easiest records I found to source were from Victoria and Tasmania.

Anyway hope all is well, time for me to pop away again