Search results

Frustrating, isn't it? I also have a box of wonderful old photos of people I can't identify. They must be siblings of grandparents or great-grandparents, so I'm still hoping to get lucky by finding cousins with similar photos. I wish I'd started a few years ago when my parents were alive.

Ah, right. It depends on the level of subscription. Wife and I started with the basic level, but soon got prompted to upgrade when we tried to look at parish records or international records. That was a bit annoying, but it was worth it between the two of us.

A lot of maybes in the future. I'd be more worried about other stuff now, like my bank account being hacked.

There are a lot of free websites that you can use - eg. https://www.familysearch.org/search/hr/search - you'll need to sign up for a free account. Also https://www.freebmd.org.uk/ You can't access that on Ancestry without paying for a subscription, but you get access to so many more records...

Nope, not a con. It's a huge industry, which would collapse if it was fake. That said, some tests have to be repeated, so maybe your "someone" got unlucky or screwed up their own test. The DNA matches give you a huge amount of information, which would be easily disprovable if it was a con.

Then it's a good thing you have seven other great-grandparents to research! Yes, it's best to start with yourself and any siblings, and add your parents and their siblings, and so on. You'll soon get loads of hints from Ancestry. Work through all your lines until you reach a brick wall, then...

Sussex people are very loyal! I've gone back 300 years on my dad's side, and they are all from Sussex. My mum's side are from Essex, Kent, Cambs, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Durham and Fife. They must have had a caravan... Bet you find lots of cousins in Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, etc.

I'm in touch with a previously unknown second cousin in New Zealand, and she sent me photos of my mum with her mum as young kids, when our families were evacuated to Scotland at the outbreak of WWII.

Well, it depends what timescale you're talking about - somewhere between leaving Africa and arriving in Brighton? I don't think it goes back more than a few generations, and I've not learnt anything from it. The ethnicity results are updated as more tests allow more "accurate" estimates (and...

Phew!

Good point. You need to consider the risks and benefits of everything you do on the Internet, and in the real world. I've decided the benefits are worth the risks, and to be fair, some of those in the article are a bit vague. Just assume that nothing is private in the modern world. Internet...

... and postie has just delivered my two kits. :thumbsup: Now I just need to convince selected relatives to dribble into a tube... :drool::drool:

Yes, you get the names of thousands of other people that match your DNA, and how close they are. I've been in touch with second cousins that I didn't previously know about. But some people uses aliases, so it's not obvious who they are. Some people make their own trees public, but some keep them...

Yes, I am into family history and DNA testing really helps confirm other research. Whether it's worth it depends on your expectations. It'll give you a vague ethnicity result, and a LONG list of tested cousins of varying distance. But you'll need to do some work on your own tree, to make sense...