Testing Siblings and other close family
This is worthwhile. I was sceptical about this at first because kits were so expensive and originally my goal was to work out what was happening back in time. However, testing close relatives can be useful, especially with the oldest relatives you have.
Testing Parents
I am sure as a teenager you probably did - but a DNA test of one of your parents means that you have two tests to match against any third party. Anyone matching you and your parent is from the parents side of the family. Any match you have who is not matching the parent is from the other parents side of your family Except that the match must be a large one. remember that any smaller match (more distant in generations)may not necessarily match you and a parent?See comments below about fourth cousins?
Using sibling matches.
If you compare the many matches of your kit and that of your sibling there will be many differences. especially where their matches do not match you. This is really useful because you both got your genes from the same parents. Therefore all the other matches relate to you too?
Even if you have only one parent in common the matches can be useful for the same reason, identifying parental sides first and then using the matches of your sibling's 'common parent'?
Many members of a distant family will not match
I match a correspondent’s mother and two of her sisters in similar ways and one brother in a different chromosome match. Another brother provides no match at all. This is the normal way that DNA is ‘randomly’ donated to children. Each child will receive a different set of gene mixtures that makes them different from each other.
Ten percent of fourth cousins can not find a DNA connection?
Where a parent is not available, uncles and aunts can be a form of substitution but bear in mind the comment above that brothers and sisters are not clones of each other. Instead of 50% of your DNA being similar to a parent it will be somewhere around 25%,or less but at least you know which side of the family it comes from.
No Parents?
New techniques are coming along where you can re-create DNA of ancestors (currently parents and, maybe soon, grandparents from children's DNA - the one drawback seems to be, ideally you would have 8 children tested!!!
Equally, you can now find the non-common DNA and start to identify this with known surnames which helps identify more distant DNA relatives.
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