Finding your relatives through your dna

IrishCentral will bring you everything you need to know about researching your Irish family history. The whole thing is pretty seamless. You go to Ancestry. You spit into a tube until it is almost full of your saliva and you send the completed test back. No relative of mine going back generations had come from anywhere other than the Emerald Isle. I had never heard of any foreign relatives and did not believe my family had stirred at all from its Irish roots.

Perfidious Albion was not part of my makeup I told him. No way. It turns out I am 14 percent British, the kind of news that left me speechless, quite a feat as many of you will know. My main genetic origin was traced back to Dingle, County Kerry , which greatly strengthened my belief in the credibility of the test.

My father's family had lived there or thereabouts for hundreds of years though I, personally, did not grow up there. The West Kerry clan most likely always married locally, no surprise given how remote the area was for hundreds of years. It remains one of the few Irish speaking areas left in Ireland, simply because of its remoteness.

I also discovered via Ancestry that I have cousins ranging from third cousins to sixth cousins who share some part of their DNA with me.

I now have their Ancestry. From living there I know the ordinary British are great. The Ancestry. It was uncanny how they were able to pinpoint West Kerry as my prime area of ancestry and the cousins will provide much interesting correspondence in the years ahead.

All in all, prepare to be surprised if you undertake the test. The chances of being percent Irish are very small I was told. To compare real-world DNA test results I recruited a panel of DNA test takers that collectively represent each of the seven major population groups identified by the companies we evaluated. For this guide to the best DNA testing kits, we focused exclusively on services offering ancestral DNA testing: tests that comb through your DNA to help find where in the world you came from, unknown contemporary relatives, or both.

But the scope of DNA analysis extends far beyond genealogy, with consequences for everything from medical diagnosis to law enforcement investigations. Using any DNA testing service involves data and privacy risks. Before deciding which of our picks is best for your needs, we urge you to spend a few moments reading our privacy section. We recommend these tests only for people who have taken the time to gain a clear understanding of how their data will be stored, shared, and protected.

Privacy policies can vary widely, from multipage PDF documents to a couple of sentences on a website.

The marketing hype around these tests suggests a level of certainty that the underlying science simply cannot provide. The accuracy of DNA test results varies depending on how much detail you're looking for. For one thing, human history is messy. And if you tend to associate ethnicity with country designations, keep in mind that national borders are an extremely recent occurrence in the span of human history. Further complicating matters is that your results from any DNA service are based on probability or likelihood, with most of the big companies relying on algorithms to assign estimates of your ancestry percentages.

For Jonathan Marks, anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the big unknown for customers is the margin for error with these estimates. It is, however, just one tool in the genealogy tool belt and is far from the final word in establishing family connections. All of the genealogy experts we talked to stressed that unearthing family history takes a lot of work.

And you may not be comfortable with what you find.

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As a society we make fundamental decisions based on notions of ethnicity and race. The fact remains, however, that And of the remaining 0.

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DNA tests simply look at how often these variations occur. Brody noted that for scientists, ethnicity and race are problematic terms because DNA simply points to biological ancestry. For this guide we limited our research to companies devoted in large part to human ancestry DNA testing. We are not covering biomedical DNA analysis that can indicate risk for hereditary diseases. The privacy and psychological factors to consider before purchasing these types of analysis are significant and fall well beyond the scope of this guide.

We further limited our contenders to those with large databases of existing customer DNA. For more information about what we dismissed and why, see the Competition section. Since we began research for this guide in , one testing service has signed a multimillion-dollar deal with a pharmaceutical company for access to customer DNA. Another has divulged that it has been providing access to law enforcement, even without a legal order.

In Canada, immigration officials are now using DNA samples and consumer ancestry websites to try to establish the nationality of migrants. There are no comprehensive federal laws or guidelines stipulating what a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company can or cannot do with your DNA data. Unlike a doctor or HMO, the vast majority of these companies are not subject to the HIPAA laws governing the privacy of your health and medical records.

2. DNA upload sites

Caplan argues that it is unnecessarily difficult for people to make a well-informed choice. The goal of these disclosures should be comprehension, not legal protection for the company. And we emphasize that adherence to these standards is voluntary, with no regulatory recourse for violations. McGinnis found the policies to be in line with common industry practices. And companies do seem to be responsive to requests for more transparency. As of this writing, the documents have been streamlined with more user-friendly language, and DNA-related policies are now incorporated into an updated terms of service document and a revised general privacy statement.

In light of news stories highlighting privacy concerns that emerged since the publication of our original guide, we asked Ancestry. We strongly encourage you to read the privacy statement of any DNA testing service before purchasing a kit. And many present you with an opt-in choice to share your genetic information with outside research projects. We knew from talking to experts that the customer databases that companies use to determine your ancestral roots can vary widely in their representation of ethnicity, with European-descended populations overrepresented by a large margin.

This means that people with ancestry from anywhere else in the world are less likely to get detailed or even useful results from their testing. To see how this bias plays out in actual results we recruited a panel of testers three men and four women who, among them, have known ancestry from Africa, East Asia, Europe, the Middle East, native North America, Polynesia, and South Asia. Because of the sensitivity involved with DNA test results, in this guide we are withholding the names of our test participants.

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In early spring the seven participants convened at our offices in The New York Times building, where they registered their kits online and provided DNA samples either by swabbing the inside of their cheeks or spitting into a tube. Once results were available we asked each tester to complete a survey comparing how companies conveyed basic ancestry information and how easy or difficult it was to navigate to more detailed analyses of results.

Beginning the testing process is easy. The next step is to collect your DNA sample by filling the provided tube with saliva. The directions state that you must refrain from eating, drinking, smoking, or chewing gum for at least 30 minutes prior to collecting your sample. Both the registration and the DNA collection process are straightforward and well-documented. The whole thing takes about 10 to 15 minutes.

Do you feel the benefits of DNA testing outweigh the risks?

A small USPS prepaid shipping box is provided for you to send your sample to the testing lab. Our panel of testers shipped their samples from New York, California, and Texas. The earliest results were available in nine days, and the longest took four weeks. From there, a single click takes you to an overview of your ethnicity estimates as well as potential relatives the site has flagged among its customer base due to the similarity of your DNA makeup.

You can see their username and profile picture and they can see yours. Family Tree's Y-DNA database, which the company states is the largest publicly available, could also be of significant help to law enforcement. Y-DNA reveals the paternal ancestry of the subject, and a match in that database would not only reveal a possible distant relative, but eventually lead authorities to a surname, narrowing their search.

For law enforcement officials, investigative genealogy has opened up an entirely new field of possibilities, one they say could prove as valuable in the effort to crack cold cases as the use of DNA matching about 20 years ago.