Friday, April 25, 2014

Happy DNA Day

Today is April 25th, which means that today is DNA day.  Happy DNA Day everyone! 

On this day in 1953, scientists publishished a paper about how they had "discovered" DNA.  You can read one account of the surrounding events here.

It is no secret that I am a big fan of DNA testing.  DNA testing for genealogy can provide great confirmation of what you already know, or clues to help solve mysteries in situations where paper documents are not available or don't adequately solve the genealogy questions you are looking for answers to.

FTDNA is having a sale, 20% off y-DNA tests, and they have a new Y-haplotree.

In other DNA related news, 23andMe has announced that they have passed 650,000 genotyped customers.  Neither 23andMe nor FTDNA appear to be having an autosomal DNA day sale, so it seems autosomal tests are not getting a sale price anywhere today except Ancestry.com.  AncestryDNA has their autosomal test on sale for $79 until 11:59 PM Apr 27th.  After that there is still the AncestryDNA Mothers Day sale of free shipping. 



If you are looking to jump into DNA testing with both feet, you can order a test from AncestryDNA, one from 23andMe, and upload the AncestryDNA data to FTDNA.  That gets you into all 3 "ponds" and you will likely have more than enough matches to keep you busy for a very long time, with more coming in all the time!  

If you do test at only one or two of the companies be sure to upload to Gedmatch.com to get your cross-company matches, and work with your matches to figure out your genealogy connection.  It can be great fun!  I am way behind in my matches correspondance (I have 14 kits with results at 23andMe, with 3 not returned yet, and results on 4 at FTDNA so it can be a bit overwhelming!)

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