The Family Trees database has been temporarily disabled. I recently moved this website to a new server and noticed when I did that the back end of the php programming driving the family trees section of the site was generating several errors. I am hoping to work with the programmer who created the module in order to fix the problems, but until I do, I didn’t think it wise to leave that section of the site up.
Thank you for your patience.
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By Sara Whitford
As the Group Administrator for the East Carolina Roots DNA project through Family Tree DNA, I often receive questions about DNA testing. People want to know what kind of information they’ll be able learn from that little cheek swab, and it’s also important for me to tell them about the limitations of those tests so they’ll be clear on questions the tests cannot answer.
I might also be able to advise someone on the best way to find the answers they seek by letting them know how they can enlist parents and siblings, as well as close and distant cousins to be tested to provide further genetic information about their family’s genetic heritage.
Here are brief summaries in layman’s terms of the most common genealogical DNA tests available.
This type of testing looks only at the y-chromosome — the chromosome that is passed directly from father to son. Although this is one of the best genealogical DNA tests you could take in terms of reliability, there are still a couple of restrictions right off the bat:
Now, that doesn’t exclude women from being able to find out about their paternal origins, but they’ll have to get someone else to take the test. According to the Y-DNA entry on Wikipedia, “Women who wish to determine their direct paternal DNA ancestry can ask their father, brother, paternal uncle, paternal grandfather, or a cousin who shares a common [Continue reading…]
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