Written narratives on the website provide a history of each reported region. Living DNA says that 3.1 percent of my DNA is from Aberdeenshire. I haven’t yet traced any ancestors to Lincolnshire, but I did find through much genealogical sleuthing that one of my sixth-great-grandfathers came from Aberdeen, Scotland. I found that 22.5 percent of my heritage came from Lincolnshire in east-central England. The company highlights ethnicity on a world map, then lets you zoom in from the continent level. When I saw the company’s ad claiming to pinpoint exactly where in the British Isles a person’s genetic roots stem from, I decided to give it a go. Living DNAĪnother expensive test ($159) came from Living DNA. The company is less certain about subregional estimates than it is about global estimates. Living DNA ENGLISH ANCESTRY Living DNA offers fine-scale ethnicity estimates for people of British or Irish descent (Saey’s results shown). Since I bought the Geno 2.0 kit as an app through Helix, I don’t know if the kit purchased directly from National Geographic, which is processed by Family Tree DNA, would yield different results. Overall, Geno 2.0 has a nice presentation, but I learned more about my family history elsewhere. I take geeky pride that 1.5 percent of my DNA comes from Neandertals, topping the 1.3 percent average for Geno 2.0 customers. The service also calculated the percentage of Neandertal ancestry that I carry. So I’m skeptical that I am actually related to those famous figures, even from the distance of 65,000 years, the last time we supposedly had an ancestor in common. I don’t know how National Geographic knows about the mitochondria of Petrarch, Copernicus or Abraham Lincoln. There’s no relative matching, though Geno 2.0 shows which historical “geniuses” may have shared your mitochondrial or Y chromosome DNA. Provides no ancestry information within the last 500 years.
To estimate ethnic makeup, a company compares your overall SNP pattern with those of people from around the world. These companies analyze hundreds of thousands of natural DNA spelling variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs.
#Is there a way to print my dna matches in ancestry series#
This story is part of a series on consumer genetic testing.