Ancestry.com is running a super sale on their popular Ancestry DNA service – just $69 per kit (regularly $99)!
This post may contain affiliate links; please read my disclosure here.
The Ancestry DNA Winter Sale 2018 lasts through February 25, 2018 at 9:00 p.m. PST.
You can buy Ancestry DNA for yourself or as a gift for someone else, and it’s definitely a gift that keeps on giving. A year after my own Ancestry DNA testing, it’s still helping me bust through genealogy brick walls and discover relatives I didn’t know I had.
Should other family members get tested if you’ve already had a test? Absolutely! It’s obvious that genetic inheritance gave you a different set of genes from your siblings (other than identical twins). You might look, act and think completely differently even if you had the same parents and grew up in the same household.
That’s the way genetic inheritance works – everyone gets a random selection of genes from each parent. Because of this, you might match different DNA relatives than your siblings, first cousins, or parents. According to Ancestry:
You and your 5th cousin have the same 4th great-grandparents. For you to have a DNA match with that cousin, the same section of DNA would have to be passed down through six generations to both of you. Since DNA recombination is a random process, there may be no common DNA inherited by both of you.
Another close relative, however, might match that 5th cousin. According to Ancestry.com, you’re very likely to share DNA with close relations such as siblings and first and second cousins. The likelihood of matching more distant cousins goes down as the number of times removed gets higher.
In addition, testing close relatives can help solve mysteries opened up by your own Ancestry DNA testing. One common conundrum is seeing ancestors that come from countries that don’t jive with what you’ve been told all of your life.
Maybe you thought you had German ancestors, but Germany isn’t on your genetic map. One possibility is that your German ancestors started out somewhere else, and your ancestors spent very little time in Germany.
Or, in the roll-of-the-dice that happened with your genes, it’s possible that you just didn’t get the genes of your German ancestors. Maybe one of your siblings did.
If you have siblings tested and also the parent on that side plus any of his/her siblings, you might be able to figure out the answer. Someone might show German ancestry, or they might all show similar ancestral maps as you.
There are some people who shouldn’t have Ancestry DNA testing. Anyone else with an interest in their family origins might really enjoy having an Ancestry DNA test.
Read more of my genealogy posts here!
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