"For one thing, they have a specific focus on Parkinson's Disease (the founder's husband is at high risk), and are involved in its research. They offer a free test kit to anyone diagnosed with the disease." alisande When I read that I went to their website and requested a free test since I have Parkinson's. Just received it earlier this week. After I went through the whole registration I found out I will only have access to ancestry information and not any health information. I would have liked to have had access to that health information but can't complain, it was free after all. Hope my DNA helps with the Parkinson's study. December 2013 – Pending an FDA decision, 23andMe no longer offers new customers access to health reports. Customers who received their health information prior to November 22, 2013 will still be able to see their health reports, but those who purchased after that time will only receive their ancestry information as well as access to their uninterpreted raw data.

If you are specifically interested in ethnic information, I wouldn't waste money on a DNA test. This is as detailed as it gets at ancestry and FamilyTreeDNA. If you want to know what town in what country you would be better off spending your money on an ancestry subscription to build a tree. I think anyone just starting would have the best luck with ancestry only because it does a lot of work for you. BUT BE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR FAMILY AND NOT SOMEONE WITH THE SAME NAME! After you get a bit of experience you will find lots of stuff on familysearch, Macavo, and all the other free sites. If I were just starting, I would subscribe to ancestry for the U.S. Discovery for 6 months $89 and build a family tree there. It's free to make a tree and free to keep it there. You can still work on it but you won't have access to any ancestry owned documents unless you are paid up. You can add documents you find other places that you've saved to your computer. One word of warning. When you find a document at ancestry or anywhere, save it to your computer with a good name so you can find it again. Then upload it to your tree if you've a mind to. The document you find today might not be there tomorrow. And beware of "family data" and other trees. Make sure it's right before you use it. Join their mailing list so you know when they run specials. No point in paying full price! Then if you are still interested pay for another 6 months or a year until you have a good handle on it. At this point I would probably use the free sites and the information I gleaned from the green leaf hints. Once you have the U.S. conquered, then if you still need help subscribe to ancestry world for 6 months $134. These are sale prices so watch carefully to be sure you get a good deal. If you let your ancestry subscription elapse they will start offering you a resubscribe deal that's pretty good. Usually 6 months to a year for the really good offer. And notice that the offer is for 6 months, not a year! There are several sites where you can build a tree or upload a GEDcom and work on it for free. But start somewhere until you are familiar with researching this type of thing. Then add some of the other sites. One tree, one site to start. You will be confused enough.

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.

I saw a blurb for a piece on a "news" program saying they tested identical triplets and "you won't believe the results". I didn't see the segment, but I did find a write-up of what appears to be that segment. http://www.insideedition.com/investigative/21784-how-reliable-are-home-dna-ancestry-tests-investigation-uses-triplets-to-find-out The results reported differed across a set of identical triplets, but less than I would have guessed: e.g. One triplet was 6% Scandinavian the other two were 0% I would also have liked for them to have done an "across companies" test where they send the same triplets' DNA samples to three different testing companies, and compare the results across the companies. But being a "news" program, they aren't especially versed in scientific rigor. Another post I found, asserts that there are three big reliable testing companies, and a bunch of other companies that have sprung up to tap into this burgeoning market, whose results are more dubious. https://dna-explained.com/2016/01/22/genealogy-and-ethnicity-dna-testing-3-legitimate-companies/