ALERT! Ancestry.com DNA testing is on sale for $69 for the four days after Thanksgiving starting now. Also you can save 20% on gift memberships at Ancestry.com
– scroll down that same page to see the offer. Click on it for even more membership offers.
Addendum [29 nov]: To see a sample of what you get with an Ancestry DNA test read this old post of mine: http://blog.kittycooper.com/2014/08/in-defense-of-ancestry-coms-dna-offering/
One of my cousin’s kits that I manage has transitioned to the new 23andme. Here is the scoop. Most everything you do on the site seems to require that you go through a tutorial before you can participate and most everything seems to have been simplified.
You do have to review your profile information and choose to opt into the Open Sharing the first time you log in. Open sharing lets your matches compare their DNA to yours to see if there are any matching segments without going through the introduction message process. This is recommended if you are doing 23andme for genealogy or adoption research.
The problem is that those of us who are deeply into using DNA for ancestry research will be disappointed by some of the loss of functionality on the new version of the site as well as by the fact that some functions are significantly clunkier for us.
The new main menu is greatly simplified, definitely an improvement. Instead of those fancy drop downs you have just four items; Home, Reports, Tools, and Research plus the little green icon with the number of messages you have listed. You have to click one of those to get to further menus.
Existing ftDNA customers get coupons
Both Family Tree DNA ($89) and AncestryDNA ($79) have Christmas sales for their DNA kits (those prices do not include shipping). I think the Ancestry.com DNA testing sale will last only until November 20th. Family Tree DNA‘s sale is on until the end of the year. In contrast 23andme just doubled their price but is adding new interfaces and health results.
Family Tree DNA has special gift coupons for existing customers; so log in every week and see what you have. Roberta Estes suggested that people could put their unwanted codes in the comments on her detailed post about the ftDNA sale. That seems like a good idea to me. You can do that here too, but please indicate in a reply to each coupon comment when you have taken that one. I will list a few of my coupon codes also.
I have written up my recommendations for where to do your DNA testing on my comparison page. Here is a summary of my current thoughts on which company to use.
Ancestry.com has a new feature which shows you the total number of centimorgans (cMs) and segments for your DNA matches. You have to go and look at at specific match to find it. Once there, you click on the little “i” in a circle next to the confidence level description and a dark box will appear with the information.
Here is what that looks like for my brother and our first cousin from her account.
Ancestry has its own algorithm for removing matching DNA that it thinks is not recent. This means that these numbers will not match what you see at GEDmatch. Perhaps some of the excluded data will appear as “Ancient” over at DNA.land but not all these kits are uploaded there yet so that report will have to wait.
Here are a few examples of the numbers for my brother’s family matches at Ancestry, as compared to those same matches at GEDmatch or ftDNA: