Originally Posted by
Jaiade
she inquired of ancestry and they told her the test was I think the word was mitochodrial(not spelled right) which meant female to female or male to male. Something to do with the females not having Y chromosomes. If you find out differently, please let me know because this is why I mentioned I was looking with my g-grandfather.
Mitochondrial DNA is only passed on through the female line of descent and it is passed on unchanged. I guess there is some stuff that has just came out in the last couple of months where very rarely you can get some from the Paternal line, basically you get like 200 bits of maternal information compared to 8 bits of male. But it is only part of the information presented in a DNA test. You will get some information on both sides of the family.
It's not really my concern so I haven't really studied it, but as I understand it full blood siblings can be anywhere from around 25% to 95% of the same genes depending on how they mixed and matched.
As I said previously, I did 23 & Me because I wanted the health screenings, already knew my family background. If you want heritage, I would go with Ancestry.Com, they have the bigger database. My mother's side of the family we have quite extensive information, or at least on some lines, through my maternal grandfather we go back to Penn (as in Pennsylvania). My father's side of the family both of his parents were basically first generation, some of their siblings were born here others not. We had direct cousins that my grandmother was able to speak to for the first time in decades once the cold war was over.
My brother had his testing done through Ancestory. So far he has not been contacted by anyone although he has that option checked. As I said before though, it's possible if I was in the database we might get some more matches. I seem to take after my paternal grandmother (Sophia) more than any other relative. I might go ahead and do a sale version of Ancestry some day just for the fun of it, I'd be open conversations from Sophia's side of things.
But -- what I can say is I am getting updates from 23 & Me as they expand their services they go back and re-evaluate their existing data. Their family history stuff is improving as more people use their services.
I am very concerned about privacy information in general, but there was no other affordable way for me to get the information I wanted. I'm not sure but I think the confirmation test ordered by my doctor to find out about my Hereditary Hemochromatosis gene was around $500, compared to the $100 (on sale) 23 & Me Kit. I don't know how many other tests we would have done to find out about the high ferric levels I had (can be a sign of inflammation) before we stumbled onto genetic testing, but I had an autoimmune panel (not cheap and first test came back with a false positive, second test more expensive but more correct), a colonoscopy, and several other (again, expensive) tests done first.