I transferred my Y DNA, mtDNA and atDNA (it appears to be Family Finder) to Geni and have some 15 mtDNA and atDNA matches. No Y DNA matches. It will give you a list of people who should match you based on your DNA and the pedigrees. With mtDNA, it seems to give very close readings for people who actually are far far away. So far I am told I have 3rd to 4th cousin mtDNA matches in Finland, Norway, and South Africa based on HVR1 and HVR2 matches. Not likely in my opinion.
Confusingly, GENI says you can transfer your 23andme or Ancestry atDNA results to GENI. The announcement with FTDNA did not mention atDNA, but my Family Finder results seem to have been transferred.
Also GENI is now affiliated to My Heritage. If you have less than 250 people in you pedigree at My Heritage there is no charge to use their service. If you want to add more people to the pedigree you must pay the basic membership price. At GENI you will often get notices of matches in the My Heritage document databases or pedigrees. If followed, these will take you to My Heritage and you will need to purchase a membership to see the information. As My Heritage charges separately for their pedigree and their document databases, this can get expensive fast.
On its own, My Heritage accepts atDNA uploads from 23andme. How these different DNA tests are going to work together in the databases is currently unknown.
There is no chromosome browser at either GENI or My Heritage at this time.
If you have known European ancestry since 1830 or so, this is probably a good deal. Otherwise it is not much use to US colonial descendants. YMMV.
1 comment:
You misstated the Geni price policy. You can build your tree for free without limitations. http://help.geni.com/entries/471431-Is-Geni-free- Pro membership gives you a few added features, like enhanced search, support, priority gedcom export, etc. Most people just use Geni for free.
As for the utility of the new dna integration, we'll have to see how it plays out. No other company with a large collaborative tree has done this before. My guess is that in areas where the tree is dense and well connected, you might be able to use the dna matches along with the relationship finder to pinpoint likely branches for finding a common ancestor. In other words, if you have an ancestor from some village, and so does someone else, it is more likely that your connected relationship to the other person, even if not yet by blood, will pass through the people in the village (because everyone there is connected by marriage, and probably by blood too, although the records might not be there to prove it yet).
In any case, this is something a bit different from what exists on other sites, so I would encourage everyone to try it out, including especially US Colonial descendants, because those trees are very dense and well documented on Geni.
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