Things I learned from Family Finder DNA test

Well, so far this week no one has called me Prince.  I guess I'll have to actually prove a royal connection before I can expect royal treatment.

But I'm still excited and having a lot of fun with my Family Finder DNA results.  The ethnic breakdown has been very interesting and worth the cost of the test by itself.

Another result of the test, and the main reason I chose FamilyTreeDNA for my testing, is that they connect you with people who show traces of being related to you. Ideally you can find someone with the same family names and make contact with them.  So far I've had zero replies. But many of these people, and there are over 800 matches for me, have posted ged.coms (a basic genealogy file of your tree) that allow access to other members.  As a result, I've gone ancestor hunting in other people's trees and have found known relatives!  Even better, I've found relatives I was 90% certain of, but not 100%, and this gives me confidence that my research and family notes were accurate.

So Grandma Davison, your notes about the Staffords and Dickinsons were spot on! So Carroll Andrew Edson, you were right when you said my 2nd Great Grandmother Lura Edson was part of your Edson Genealogy! And wouldn't you know that Lura's ancestor was my 9th Great Grandmother Frances Deighton?  And Frances, she's so famous you can Google her!  She's what they call a gateway ancestor, who leads us back to all sorts of famous people, like signers of the Magna Charta, Kings of England, and Kings of France.

So I think I'll give the royalty stuff another week and see if I get called any interesting names.

Bottom line, the DNA tests are fun and worth it.

Next week, let's talk about findagrave.com and the importance of persistence in genealogy!