DNA test experience comments

18 of the 61 responses to the survey left comments which are sometimes more instructive that the survey question responses (results here).

DNA test strongly suggests a previously unknown NPE in my ancestry.

I was surprised to find out that my great-grandmother was Jewish, hence the endogamy which confuses my results on MyHeritage and FamilyTreeDNA but not as much on Ancestry. DNA testing has been fun and challenging but I have been very disappointed in the response rate from DNA matches. I could flog a dead horse and say that I wish that Ancestry would provide a chromosome browser but their other tools and huge database have been very helpful.

Ancestry's "Shared Matches" are useless on my endogamous branch (only chromosomal triangulation will help there, sadly), but are very helpful for my non-endogamous lines. While the MyHeritage experience has been overall very worthwhile, I'm finding too many false positives, the latest one with a 20 -cM "matching" segment. And there's no mistake, it is definitely a false natch, and that shakes my confidence in their matching algorithm.

Not much new discovered, but it's interesting.

DNA testing coupled with "records" has proven to be very useful; Y-DNA testing not so much with FTDNA - appears to have "daughter-out".

Ancestry's power comes from the sheer size of its database and its matching algorithm. Downsides: the numbers of DNA matches only interested in their ethnic roots and our inability through Ancestry to analyse these matches by chromosome.

Moderate knowledge, greatly assisted by a more expert wife.

My level of satisfaction is based on the number of relatives I have that have tested at each site.

Have had some good luck with finding relatives. My 2x times great grandmother came to Canada with her sister Jane and her brothers. 

Thanks to DNA I now know the names of her brothers.
It was very interesting with a few small surprises, but ties in perfectly with my research.

My results and experiences were as I expected.

French Canadians - lots of endogamy.

It's all been good in general, ancestry has the most accurate model for my autosomal admixture (at least with 8 generations).

I would have liked Ancestry to offer more tools to investigate DNA matches although gedmatch somewhat fills the need.

DNA analysis works well with uncommon surnames but very poorly with very common ones such as Davies, Jones, James.

I've had the most fun with Gedmatch's research tools, being able to compare my gene segments with people who tested with many different testing companies.

I was required to delete or add estimated dates for all my ancestors before Thruline would work, was quite onerous. I also cannot understand why "unlinked" are listed as potential cousins. Finally probably like other users, private and very small tree numbers add to the difficulty of finding a potential cousin.

Gobsmacked. Discovered I was adopted - and I have been researching for years!