So, you’ve taken one of these…
And, you got back your results that look something like this…
What do you do with it now that you have it?
I was roaming around the internet this week looking for information on autosomal DNA. I came across the Wheaton Surname Resources websites. Here I found the free guide “Beginners Guide to Genetic Genealogy“. The guide includes lessons on how to understand your DNA test results. It starts off basic, then gets into more advanced topics.
Lessons 1-9 cover the basics: an overview of genetic genealogy, which DNA test should you take, and understanding more about the test you or your loved one has taken. Y, mtDNA, and autosomal are covered.
Lessons 10-16 cover more advanced topics: chromosome mapping, figuring out which autosomal DNA comes from which chromosome sequences and relates to which ancestral line, privacy issues, and so forth.
I have found it incredibly helpful. I’m at the stage where I want to take my list of matches and figure out if these people really are related to each other when FTDNA says we have DNA in common. Then, I would like to go to the next step and identify which sequences come from which side of my family and which line. There are many tools out there that I haven’t even begun to explore!
If you want to get into the topic even further, there are several books that cover the field of genetic genealogy. The more we understand how this works and the limitations and the possibilities we can make more sense of our matches. Once we do that, we can make the cousin connections that we truly crave.