I believe Ancestry is much more thorough than 23andme. My son did he latter, as he just wanted to know the makeup of his ethnicity, which it gave him, stating the percentage of each ethnicity shown in his genes. But it doesn't match your DNA to other people, if I recall correctly. So if you are trying to establish a direct link to blood relatives, I think you'd have to do Ancestry, if I'm correct.

I did Ancestry. Plan to also do 23andMe. I think each add it's own value to understanding your heritage. I say this because one of my granddaughters and daughter did 23andMe. They plan to also do Ancestry.

On a recent visit My brother had his results from his recent 23andme DNA report. It was the basic test that he had received as a Christmas gift. He and I were surprised by how 'generic' the results seem to be. (96% Eastern European, the other 4% a mix of other nothing too specific). We accept that is how we are made up, just figured the results would pinpoint better then they did.

Of course, he is now receiving emails from 23andme trying to sell him a more thorough report.

Beware.

So has anyone done Ancestry and were able to trace their roots? Possibly meet relatives? That's what I'm looking for.

Ancestry focuses mainly on finding relatives, 23/me give you some questionable material like you may be allergic to...., or you may be likely to have....

Sleeper, have you checked Ancestry to see if someone may have already done a family tree of your father's ancestors?

23 and Me does match you up with other people who might be related, but that's it. You can contact them if you want, as long as they want to be in contact with you.

Thing is, your relatives there will have had to sign up with one or the other... you can't get a match if no one else has done so. I think more people may end up signing with Ancestry than 23andMe if they are interested in finding relatives, so that may be the way to go, but I don't know which service is more popular over in Croatia. That will matter. Or, you may find relatives here in the states, who are in actual contact with the families back abroad.

I did 23andMe, but my uncle had already done an extensive family tree by old fashioned means. I was mainly curious to see genetic ethnic background, some medical traits and tendencies, and yes, how Neanderthal I am... (4%.) I didn't sign up to be contacted by anyone... (with either service, you have that option to opt out of being contacted).

So, it's going to be a chance, but with your desires, I'd go with Ancestry as being a better chance.

I want to use the one with the most details and not a generic answer of Northern European. I already know my ancestors came from Germany and Switzerland by research done by cousins on both sides. Which company gives the most details?.

My husband and I both took the Ancestry test. At that time it told me my closest match, of everyone who had submitted a sample, was a great great niece. Now I have three nieces that are closer. This is correct. In the past I did some family research and it was fun to see some of the surnames I found on my results. As far as nationality it wasn't to helpful. We both found out we have a lot of Irish in us. That was a surprise.

23 and Me gave me a pretty detailed account. If you are mostly Northern European that's what you will get, but if you have other heritage you will get that as well. I had .o1 percent Native American as well as small percentages of others. Also have found many cousins as well. Am going to do Ancestry and see how they report.

Lily, for detailed genetics I am considering Living DNA. They drill down a lot further than Ancestry or 23andMe. They don't match you up with family, if that is a desire. I am going to wait a year or at least until next winter, and will re-submit DNA. I'm just highly curious. I know my ancestors came from Germany/France, and from the British Isles, with a strong Scandinavian component. I do want to know more, out of sheer curiosity. Giving them time will help them build their detailed map for me (and for others)

Each company has its own specialty. Over time, each develops more knowledge.

I don't believe either of these companies are particularly popular or active in Europe (or elsewhere abroad, for that matter) and if so, the likelihood of identifying specific related individuals still in someone's ancestral regions isn't great. For those abroad interested in genealogy (which itself I believe is much less popular there for obvious reasons), civil and parish records are at hand and available.

One of these companies IS more popular/active in Europe - which is why hubby and I did two tests. I can't remember which one, though - and he's at work so I can't ask him. He found many relatives in England, Finland (surprise!), France, Croatia (surprise!) who had also used the same DNA kits.

Ancestry did not include my relatives in Belgium or Germany. We are related through my great great grandparents. I am in touch with my Belgian relatives.

"Ancestry did not include my relatives in Belgium or Germany."

Ancestry didn't include any relatives in Germany because, at this time, Ancestry isn't doing DNA tests in Germany. We had to get a DNA test kit into Germany (one of hubs' brothers took it with him on a business trip), and then, since by German law DNA cannot be mailed out of Germany, the daughter of the person being tested brought the kit with her on a trip with her fiancé to the USA and Canada and put it into a mailbox outside a post office in Boston.

Hubs and I have both had our DNA tested by Ancestry. Neither of us has made any outstanding discoveries of relatives because of the test, but that's because I've been working on our family tree for over 30 years. On the other hand, I've been contacted by many, many people because of my tree on Ancestry, as well as my genealogy website. The best contact (for me) was a second cousin in Italy who used the "contact us" link on my website. He sent me photos of my great-grandparents that I had never seen before. I knew the names of my great-grandparents, but I had never seen any photos of them at all. He also sent me a scan of a letter that my grandmother had written to his grandmother, as well as a scan of a letter that one of my great-uncles had written to his wife. Absolute treasures that I would not otherwise have.

Chloecat, I hope you return to tell me which is more popular in Europe. Right now, I'm leaning towards Ancestry. Thanks for all the info, I appreciate it!

We think it was Ancestry. We also did MyHeritage. Both gave us almost exactly the same results, with regard to our ethnicities. Their online sites also allow you to upload results from the other tests, for comparison. Then there's gedmatch, which is a great resource for research.

23 and Me is what my niece used. Her father in law did too. It knew my nephew was her first cousin (neither knew the other used the same site) and her father in law found a sister through it.

I just got results from 23andme, and they did surprise me a bit. I thought I was mostly German, but it said I was 52% British Isles (Britain + Ireland) and only 22.7% French/German (which they lump together), but I know that my grandmother was 100% Alsatian and considered herself German. I can also trace other ancestors back to Germany (but not England), and so I felt the percentage was low. It also said that I am 0.1% Chinese, 0.1% Taiwanese, 0.1% Indonesian, 0.3% native American, and 0.4% SE African (Kenya/Tanzania). I'm not sure how relevant anything less than 1% is. I'm also 4.5% Scandinavian. I wonder if they considered my Saxon ancestors to be English, as otherwise they do not show much in the percentages that they should. In addition, I am slightly less than 4% Neanderthal, and I chose 23andme because they include this percentage, and I was most curious about this. I'm still 99% NW European, and so my background is not very diverse.

I have a first cousin (our fathers were brothers) who went on ancestry.com, and so I have names of ancestors from my father's side of the family from her. My mother's mother was from Alsace, and I've not been able to find out much about those relatives; my mother's father was Scots-Irish, and so that may be where a lot of the British Isles blood comes from. The rest I think comes from ancestors who have been in the U.S. for a very long time.

I also learned that I am 0% Jewish and 0% Italian or Mediterranean, even though my g-g-grandmother had an Italian name and has relatives today is Switzerland that my cousin has been in contact with.

Maybe I should now plan a trip to Tanzania. I'm curious about how many other people found African ancestors.

I had a long comment for Lars and my computer closed so will try again. Alsace has been bounced back and forth between France and Germany for several centuries. So to say your relatives were German or French or other is probably impossible. Then there is the thing that Germany as more than a tiny country did not exist until about 1871. Before that there were many small states/countries. I see so many people who are unaware that what countries are here currently did not exist at one time. I often see people entering their family data from before the Revolutionary War with current state, county, city, and country. Many of which simply did not exist when the relatives lived in that area.

I do both of them but on Ancestry I track the documents connecting people. There was a thread on this several months ago. Someone mentioned that although someone may have been married the only truth was the mother as the male parent may not have been the father. A problem many encounter, I am having serious problems with it right now, is that families can have the same names for generations. Each branch do name the children with the same names so you have to go more by the birth date and the paperwork than what someone has previously entered as true. An example of this I found the child has a birthdate before the birthdate of the parent or multiple spouses during the same time. The last can happen but is unusual.

Germany might have have been a country before 1871, but the German language has been around a lot longer than that, and I have documents from ancestors on my father's side written in German that date back before 1871 when they were Prussian. I think they may have entered Prussia from Sweden in the 17th Century during the 30 years war when Sweden was colonizing parts of Prussia. So my ancestors on my father's side who said they were German may really have been Scandinavian. We just do not have any family records going back to England, and that's where 23 and me said most of my ancestors are from.

I swear those Irish get themselves involved all over the place. I want to do one of these tests. I will be very disappointed if all that shows up are Irish genes.

(As an aside, my dad found a bunch of completly missing relatives on his fathers side. Like nine or ten siblings. And one bigamist. My mom's parents were first cousins so that is a VERY interesting family tree. Uncle Jerry traced their family back to the sixteenth century and had to stop when horse thieves showed up in the history. My dad says "we only lost our's, no horse thieves on my side of the family" lol).

I'd love to know about horse thieves in my family history!!! No reason to stop, it's well past the date when they could be arrested!

Back in the 80s my uncle was big on doing the family tree. He got back just so far before the trail died, around the 1700s.

Don't be surprised if you find some Scandinavian genes when you get tested. Vikings travelled a bit. I'm supposed to be 3/4 German, 1/4 English, but about 10% turned out to be Scandinavian.

My husband has done both. There are more that have done Ancestry so your chances of finding a match would be better IMO. His results were basically the same for both. And IMO Ancestry is as vague as 23 and me -- percentage English/Irish not English from the coast of Devon. You have to trace your roots on Ancestry to find that out.

Go for it the tests and results are a lot of fun. My wife and I both did ancestry. Our test respectively matched us correctly with known cousins and second cousins that had also had the test done. A few weeks afterwards one of the list of connections (possible second cousin)contacted me saying they were related to me, not sure how, but that their father had been adopted. She had been searching for family but his adoption records through the church were quite secret at the time. After poking around a bit it turns out her father was the son of my grandfather's sister, given up when the sister was a young girl. I was able to connect this woman with a lot of aunts, uncles and cousins. Good stuff!

Ancestry has the largest data base of testers by far. Once you test there you can upload your results to Family Tree DNA and My Heritage DNA for free. You can also upload to Gedmatch so by far you will have the most matches using Ancestry. If you test somewhere else you cannot upload to Ancestry. You can also make a tree at Ancestry and attach your DNA results to it. If you have time have your relatives that are going to travel to Croatia take a few kits with them and test others that they meet there who you think might be relatives. Then you can bring the kits back and find out if they match you.

Joann

I'll never do the DNA testing. If it proves you have a pre-existing illness that you didn't know about, and you get that illness your insurance does not have to pay for your medications. And they can find it out...............

Everyone has some type of pre-existing illness. Since Debby is apparently in Canada I can not comment about her "your insurance does not have to pay for your mediations" in Canada but in the US in most states if your insurance pays for medications they are covered. There are very few illnesses that do not have some genetic link.

Ancestry.com testing looks at ethnic/nationality connections only -- unlike 23&me, which has been orienting itself toward genetic-linked traits. I don't know about others like MyHeritage and GEDmatch. All the companies are limited in ethnic location detail because their pools of test subjects are too small to narrow results down to smaller regions. Plus, as someone pointed out above, there have been major ethnic migrations and conquests throughout Europe -- so links to Saxony could conceivably appear in England and be identified as English (Anglo-Saxon!) because that is where most of the test subjects that show the link are. Vikings are another example, and there were even Spaniards and Romans who landed in and remained in Britain that might still show up as trace DNA.

Sleeperblues, did you ever choose a test, and did you have any success with finding links to people in Croatia?

I chose not to have the health tests done on 23andme, and I have Medicare anyway; thus I was not concerned about losing health insurance.

My sister did Ancestry some time ago and said she got the same British results that I did but not the other results, and so now she wants to do 23andme. I might go ahead and do Ancestry also. The geographic placement for my ancestors from 23and me put the French-Germans in Schleswig-Holstein and Bavaria plus southern Holland, Friesland, and unknown regions of France. It did not list Alsace or Saxony even though I know I had ancestors there. For British Isles, it put them in London (plus eight other English regions plus Glasgow) and mostly Dublin for Ireland, plus possibly Roscommon, but these ancestors are so remote that I really don't know anything about them. It completely left out Northern Ireland.

It seems more useful to start building a "family tree" than to rely solely on DNA to try to find connections. Either ancestry.com or familysearch.org allow you to create an account and input known information that will hopefully link you into the vast networks of data already accrued and documented. Accounts at familysearch.org are free. My mother did family history research for decades; it is wonderful to not only know of all the connections currently living--but to also share the truly colorful stories and photographs from the past.

I agree with doing your family tree through ancestry rather than simply relying on the DNA tests. With ancestry you can be given hints as to who your ancestors were but you need to actually look at the documentation that comes with it. If your ancestors came to the US recently and you may not need the "world" membership that allows you to see the documentation such as birth and death records in other countries.

If you find that your record is incorrect edit the information because your records before that date will disappear from your family tree. The information is there and you will receive suggestions but I several centuries disappeared when I deleted a father to correct the sequence.

If some of the family history seems incorrect vs. DNA remember that much of history had continual wars in much of Europe. Women had little choice other than have sex or die.

Lars, Northern Ireland is a part of the Northern European designation as is Scotland.

No site is more accurate than the size of its database.

You will always find mysteries. The family that came from Alsace in the early 1800s has a name that is either Russian, French, German, Jewish, or Middle European. Because the pictures all show very dark hair, dark eyes, I always thought they were probably Jewish Russians. Neither of which show in my DNA. This is the last family that immigrated as most came here in the 1600's through mid 1700's.

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?

Lars only one family. Most are English/Irish/Scottish with some French and German. They always seemed to be on the loosing side of the wars in England and Scotland so spent time on the Continent. The last names of the ones from the Alsace were Recht and Inu. From family history they may have been cousins.

My Alsatian relatives were Wiegand and Hübenthal and spoke German even after they got to Texas. I have a German hymnal that I got from my grandmother that her family used at a German church in central Texas.

In my hometown in Ohio there were so many German immigrants in the early 1900s that some of the public schools were taught in German (I read that at one point, the population of Cincinnati was 50% Germanic immigrants) and that only changed around the time of WW1.

Many areas that had Germanic Immigrants did not loose the immigrants but all of a sudden they became immigrants from other countries. Austria was a popular one since many people had heard of it.

The footprint of today's Austria is just a small piece of the nation of the Empire of Austria/Hungary that existed at the beginning of the 20th century. It was one of the larger countries of Europe and while it contained many ethnic minorities (including many standalone countries today like Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and parts of others), it did have plenty of German speakers here and there,

But I'm not sure that claiming antecedents in Austria-Hungary was any better than Germany. A-H and Germany were allies during WW 1. Remember it was the assassination of the A-H Archduke/heir apparent in the Balkans that served as the excuse to start the war.

I am intrigued by genetic backgrounds. I find it funny some people say they are 100% of a certain authenticity. I truly do not believe anyone is 100% of anything. My thoughts are this. What is printed on ones birth certificate is not always the truth. You can put anybody's name on one. Many have done so. Mother or father had an affair, father or mother conceived a child with hired help, Parental involvement with an unwed mother finding the mother a "husband" to keep face in the community and so on. I am not saying by any means this was every family but it certainly did/does happen. Lot of generational secrets out there. IMHO