In my capacity of running 9 DNA studies and advising people on
testing, I have been looking at the information on Family Finder from
FTDNA in comparison to 23andMe's Relative Finder Ancestry Edition.
Family Finder is only looking at the non-sex chromosomes and it does
not include mtDNA testing. If we include the minimal testing of Y dna
and/or mtDNA at the Genographic Project (to get the lowest price) a
female would undercut the price of the 23andMe Relative Finder
Ancestry Edition test, but would still not have the X chromosome
tested, and a male would pay more than Relative Finder Ancestry
Edition and still not have the X chromsome tested.
My ancestry is mainly Colonial American from the British Isles with
some French, German, and Norwegian. My experience with Relative
Finder is that of the 30,000 plus people in the project, I have
matches with 307. I have sent out 106 sharing requests with 5
declines, 69 contacts accepted, and 32 contacts with sharing. Of the
32 sharing I have found the common ancestor for 6 of them. 3 of them
share on the X chromosome. Hopefully as the database grows I'll have
more matches and shares.
I think the companies should require a 5 or 6 generation pedigree
chart from the people testing which would be shared with their
matches. I think that would really help with the process of finding
common ancestors.
This also brings up the question of what happened to the Sorenson
Molecular Genealogy Foundation's plans to release an autosomal
database which would be linked to the pedigrees they collected. Does
anyone have any information from SMGF?
While I am getting the Family Finder testing, and have done the
23andme complete edition, exchanged with deCODEme, and the SMGF testing, I am somewhat
disappointed in the results so far, and will have to really see some
improvements before I can recommend these tests to any but the most
dedicated genetic genealogists.
