Anyone do the Ancestry Thing?

[CelticBanshee3]

Is the "DIY Dodecad" fairly simple to use? I've been researching my Mom & Dad's genealogy the old fashion way, family group sheets, census, library, Courthouse, etc. I got my brother to do the Ancestry DNA for my Dad's line. I'm thinking about getting him to do it again with My Heritage and maybe one other. I just want to know where they migrated from to here. Thery were here for the Revolutionary War in York District, South Carolina. Probably sometime before that.

Yes, it's easy to use. it comes as  single program inside a "wrapper", a GUI. You just download the raw DNA file from the DNA service, which is typically about 5 or 6 mb, and run the software on that file. But be warned, there are a lot of differing datasets you can run it against, and every one is going to give you a different result. Some are entirely invalid - for example, if an pure African ran his DNA against a European dataset, or vice versa, he'd get really wonky results.

If you got your brother to do the test, that means you will be able to know your dad's Y-DNA haplogroup as well as your mom's (and both yours and your brother's) mtDNA haplogroup. It's possible for some of those haplogroups to be traced back thousands of years, recording a lot of migrations.

There are a lot of free DNA analysis programs out there, with a lot of different purposes. DIY Dodecad is not the only one. One guy in Australia wrote a tone of programs for DNA analysis, gives them away free on the internet, but no longer maintains them - he gave up coding DNA software to devote full time to evangelizing for Christians.

Some of it is pretty intricate, and may be difficult to use, but with a minimum or research to figure out the terminology, you'd be up and running with it in no time at all. If I can figure it out, you can, too.

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Thanks, Ninurta!