To spit or not to spit

If you are late to the DNA train, please consider being tested. True story: My husband discovered an adult daughter he never knew he had. And grown grandchildren. It changed our lives for the better.

Even if you don’t have a big reveal like that, you can help some else discover who they are or connect them to unknown family members. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give someone. Besides being an organ transplant donor. Or giving someone CPR. You get my point.

If you do test, please post at least a small family tree, if allowed, so that other matches can tell how they may be related to you. If someone sends you a note, asking about a possible match, please respond, whether or not you have anything valuable to add to their search. You don’t have to write a novel or do their search work for them. If you don’t have an answer to their question, just say so.

Although it doesn’t really matter which company you test with, that is also conditional upon your main reason for doing the DNA test. If you are looking for answers or lost family members, Ancestry has the largest number of participants. If you are looking for where you came from genetically, which is, frankly, speculation, then you may prefer testing with another company or with multiple companies.

No matter which company you test with, consider uploading your DNA test results to GEDmatch.com. This site allows people who tested on different sites to compare their results and add to their potential matches. The site also has some great tools for helping determine your genetic admixture.

If you are a criminal or have a family member who has committed a serious crime, you may want to think twice about the whole DNA test business since law enforcement is now using DNA to track down offenders. On the other hand, maybe it would be a deterrent to committing a crime if a person knew he or she would eventually be captured because their family members put their DNA on GEDmatch.

Any criminals in my family are doomed to be apprehended sooner or later, since I’ve tested with all the major DNA testing companies and uploaded the results to GEDmatch. As far as I’m concerned, genealogy prevails every time.