Wednesday 28 October 2015

DNA.Land

Found the new kid on the block for your autosomal DNA data yet? DNA.Land

Read Kitty Cooper's blog about it here, where there are links to other blogposts at the bottom.

Download your autosomal raw data file from any of FamilyTreeDNA (build 37), Ancestry or 23andme, register, upload, wait a day or so for the matches and check to see what you've learnt.
If you manage more than one kit and the participants are happy to share, you'll need a separate email for each kit.
These  hints for multiple email addresses on the one account may help


Thursday 15 October 2015

BigY/SNP packs

Those of you following Y-DNA trails towards male line surname matches have undoubtedly noticed the advent of BigY testing and the recent welcome addition of SNP pack offerings from FamilyTreeDNA.

I hope that you have all joined your relevant Y-DNA haplogroup project and followed the advice of the admins for these as to whether or not the SNP packs that have recently been offered to sort out the top levels of the haplogroup tree are relevant for your particular circumstances and existing test levels.

For those venturing forth into BigY, Roberta Estes has a useful blog post from last year:
http://dna-explained.com/category/novel-variants/

The RUNCIMAN project has recently ordered the first BigY test for its SNP testing guineapig and we await results with interest - keep an eye on the RUNCIMAN blog for the results.

The quest that got me into DNA testing in the first place was for my HENDERSON brickwall.  BigY results are in, and we appear to still be stonewalled at S7361 down the R1b tree and awaiting a breakthrough match or a growing number of people sharing the same "novel variants" to create a new branch.
Autosomal testing is providing some intriguing leads in the meantime.