I have been doing genealogy for about 3 years now. Both my husband and I have done the autosomal test on ancestry and he has done a Y test with FTDNA and I uploaded his results from ancestry to FTDNA and both of ours to GEDMATCH. I was lucky - I traced down an ancestor from a man with the same surname whose line is proven back to the 1640's. He paid for and did the Y test for us to see if my husband's line connected with his. We had felt sure it would as there are several other family surnames in the same area and some even moved on to where hubby's family did in the 1700's. When that didn't pan out, I found a 4th cousin of hubs and he did the Y test. They do match closely and it proves the line back to the late 1700's. Right now I am trying to prove a connection of my husband's family to my family! Found out that his mother's father's family lived in the same area as my mother's family and that my mother's father's line actually at one time lived in the same county as my father's family. I have even found someone who showed up on my husband's autosomal match list that shows up on my list! It is frustrating when you try to contact someone and they don't respond. I keep my trees private but I always answer when I get a request and try to find a common ancestor. If I feel comfortable doing so, I share my tree then. I would love to have my brother do a Y test but its pricey and when we did my husband's we only did the 37. Now I am told you should do at least a 67(?) one to get results. Problem is - there have only been a dozen or so others with the same last name who have been tested. He does match a group of men with another last name and there are hundreds of them tested. Not sure what is up with that!

I’ve had my DNA done through Ancestry and use it mostly for cousin matching. Within each person's ethnicity estimate, you can expand each region to learn more about it. Ancestry has a series of short videos on their DNA test that I found very informative: https://www.ancestry.com/academy/course/ancestry-dna-101 There one video of less than 7 minutes that’s specifically about ethnicity. You might want to check it out. As I recall, it said that the ethnicity estimates go back 500 to 1000 years.

My grandmother's parents and siblings left Alsace in the 1890s, and my grandmother (the youngest) was born in 1901. Their family name is German, as was my great grandmother's maiden name. My grandmother had brown hair and hazel eyes, but her sister had red hair and blue eyes. I don't remember meeting other uncles or aunts - just cousins. I guess the database is really too small to be extremely accurate, but I do trust the Neanderthal component. It did make me think that Europeans moved around so much over the centuries that it really doesn't make much difference anyway. I know my Saxon ancestors lived in both Hildesheim and Görlitz, and so they may have moved around Germany quite a bit, but they owned a lot of land before they left. The documents I have from them discuss sales of land after they had already immigrated to Galveston. They left Germany on a ship from Hamburg. Some of my American ancestors I can trace back to Charleston, SC around 1700, but that's about it. I don't know how they got to Charleston or whether they immigrated directly to there from Europe (probably England). Europeans that I've met have told me that I look like I am mostly likely from northern Italy, whereas my brother looks Irish or possibly Scottish. There are a lot of redheads in my family, but I am not one of them. I've read that that is a Neanderthal trait. Maifleur, is your family also from Alsace?

I did a Y-DNA 37 markers test at FamilyTreeDNA. There were no big surprises. I had researched my line back to colonial Virginia and found my first ancestor had come to Prince William County, VA in about 1724. He had come from Wales. He was granted a large tract of land (over 500 acres). It was surveyed by a young George Washington. By 1737, he was selling out and removing to the south west part of Virginia to what is now Pittsylvania county where he established a 420 acre plantation. Much later, his first parcel of land back in Prince William Co. became part of the Quantico Marine Corps Base. My parents had said we were Scotch-Irish, but they did not know much about their ancestors except for their grandparents. My genealogy search did find one Scot by the name Hugh McCoy who married an English lady named Jemima Franklin. The ancestor of these Franklin(s) had come from Acton, England. I had not unearthed my Irish. I suspected that my mother's line, Marlow, was rich with Irish, but had met a brick wall in that line after the 2 generations back. I did find that my mother's grandmother was from a Ratliff family who had come from Kentucky to Missouri shortly before the US Civil War. I had not documented a single Irish person, although, there could have been some because the ethnicity of most of my family tree is unknown. I took the DNA test in hopes of finding an Irish match. I struck out. I got only a couple of matches. That was disappointing but not a surprise since my surname is relatively rare. Before public phone searches were tamped down, a white page search found 250 names in the US, 25 of which had the spelling of my name and 200 were an alternate spelling. (Both spellings has been documented in an early family in Illinois.) My DNA test showed 100% European ancestors: Great Britain, 74%; Ireland, 23%; and East Slavic, 3%. Here's the problem: I took the Y-DNA 27 marker test. The Y-DNA is passed from father to son and changes only randomly. Its a good marker for diving back 5 generations. However, it traces only the male line. There could be plenty of Irish hiding in my female line which constitutes 50% of my ethnicity. Also, maybe not many people in my line has taken a DNA test with this particular Company. I need to take another test, mtDNA. The mtDNA is passed by a mother to all her children. However, this won't guarantee a large number of new matches since it depends on how many persons in my line who have taken the mtDNA test.