Would it make more sense to mtDNA my mom OR me or both?

Question

I have a few dna-related questions.

1. If I can only afford one mtDNA test, I should have my mom do the test, not me?
2. Is FamilyTreeDNA a good place to get any dna test?
3. Could someone please explain how a mtDNA test is important for my genealogy?

See, I need to test my dna through FamilyTreeDNA for the Sinclair Project, because it seems that uploading my autosomal dna from Ancestry (or anywhere else) is not acceptable for the project, I guess. If I need to prove my Sinclair line and I am a Sinclair from my father, then a mtDNA would not help. Correct? MtDNA ONLY tells me the traits I inherited from my mother, correct?

Thank you!

Missy 

Comments

Missy,

I saw your frustration with finding few people to match you.  I too seem to be working awfully hard to get DNA test takers connected to me.   This is why I posed a question here on Wikitree G2G..https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1021755/possible-blast-wikitree-promotion-people-looking-connections

How do we get people with DNA to become aware of this site called WikiTree?  I have rundown every lead that had a chance to reveal a clue of a possible match.  Chromosome to overlapping strands, and some with trees and some without, but locations listed or a surname or two.  All hoping I could match these new prospects with ones I had already placed, and get a hint that others might fit.   It seems candidates are too few and far between.. We need more matches!    

As far as mTDNA does not matter which of you tests..  Your moms DNA is as good as your as both follow the maternal line.. Since you are not male, you might be able to recruit one for a 99$ YDNA-37 test then upgrade if it hits?  

Autosomal will give you the most bang for the buck as you can follow all lines six generations or so.  But then again, if you test and others are not aware of you (because you are only on the one DNA site), you are again stuck like me waiting..   I'd like to be proactive and not just wait.   How do we get visibility..  Doe anyone know how to move WikiTree up on search engine's, so WikiTree can promote people with existing trees and active DNA sharing?  Surely if we all click daily on a WikiTree posting "Join WikiTree for its community of One World Tree with DNA verification tools, and at no cost to any user", that should be as good as an advertisement right?  We need to get trees off the PC and get these DNA resources onto WikiTree.

Thanks for your post!

Answer 1

If you are tracking a surname, it's Y-DNA that you need to test. I'm going to make an assumption that you're female (you signed off as Missy!) so you'll need a male relative to test - father, brother, nephew etc - as long as he has a direct Sinclair line.

Family Tree DNA is without doubt the best company to test with for this - https://www.familytreedna.com/products/y-dna

The test to start with is the 37 marker test, and if you get matches, upgrading (you and matches) to Big Y will tell you much more about how long ago common your common ancestor lived, your haplogroup and so on. There are excellent fora for projects on their website including one for Sinclair - https://www.familytreedna.com/my/group-join?group=Sinclair& - where you will get excellent advice on interpreting results. There are good Facebook groups with experts who can help as well.

And as it happens, there's a sale on at the moment, lasting until the 26th of April.

Comments

Hello Henry,

Thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge and opinions. I appreciate it. My sister’s son did an ancestry dna test (and we are dna confirmed as “close family-1st cousin” with Shared DNA: 1,792 cM across 62 segments). So I could use his information for proving my paternal Sinclair lineage? My father is gone and so is his only brother. I have no brothers, only one sister who only had the one son. Would that relationship work? 

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Hi,

Always delighted to help. Your Ancestry test (they test autosomal DNA, ie the first 22 chromosomes) does indeed prove that you and your nephew (I hope I read that right) share  common ancestor, as in you and your sister share parentage. That doesn't necessarily prove Sinclair lineage though, unless you can show other Sinclair matches. Have any Sinclair matches through the Ancestry test? Put the name into the search field in the results to see.

Are you aware of any second cousins who could test? They would be descendants of your grandfather's brother(s), if he had any.

Failing that, contact matches from Ancestry, work out how they are related and see if they will test. The tester has to be a male from an unbroken line of male Sinclairs as Y-DNA is only passed from father to son.

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Henry,

You are not going to believe this, but I tell you it is true! My father only had one brother and four sisters. The boys ONLY had girls each! The only boy cousins in my father’s family are all descended from the girls in the family. Also, my father’s grandmother (the last of my line to have Sinclair as their last name) was the only surviving child of her father, Joshua Cilley Sinclair (1825-1898)! So we are now going back to his father, George Washington Sinclair (1796-1830)! I have only found one descendant (so far) of his son, Napoleon B Sinclair (so no triangulation there yet). I went up one more generation to George’s father, Joshua Sinclair (1760-1849)! Then I found many descendants of two of George’s sisters. That is why I am having such a problem. I am in dna hell! Ha ha!  

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Oh dear, that is a bit of a nightmare! You should definitely do an autosomal test (Ancestry has the biggest database) and see if any Sinclair matches appear. Have a few relatives (female is fine) test as well, the older the generation the better. DNA doesn't get shared evenly so a relative could easily have a match that you don't.

Autosomal DNA will take you back 5 or 6 generations; only exceptionally will it take you further. So any matches with the Sinclair name will almost certainly descend from one of the people you've mentioned. If you set the search for people with Sinclair in their trees, you'll pick up people whose mothers, grandmothers etc were Sinclairs as well so you can ask them about their connections and maybe find a Y candidate.

Of course, don't forget about good old fashioned leg-work. Keep plodding away, trying to wotk back to the present day as well. You may well find someone.

Good luck!

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I agree with Henry.  Good old fashioned leg work!  Don't just look for DNA matches.  Trace all the male Sinclairs as far as you can.  You might find descendants who haven't tested, but would if you asked them, especially if you paid for the test(s).

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Henry and Julie,

I did not understand the concept that I had to research all the male descendants of male descendants. I just did not totally understand Y dna testing and its importance. Thank you!

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It's genuinely a pleasure to help someone

Answer 2

1) I did only my own mtDNA test, not my mom's or grandma's. They're going to be identical anyway, and when you match with someone, it will confirm the relationship all the way down to you.

2) I've only tested through Family Tree DNA, so I can't compare to other test companies, but I have no issues with them!

3) An mtDNA test can be used to confirm your direct maternal line. So that's your mother, her mother, her mother, etc. To see an example, you can take a look at my relationship with my 3rd cousin, 3x removed. We compared mtDNA results and were a match, which confirmed both of our lines back to our common maternal ancestor.

Comments

Thank you for the example! That was great to see! I am at a brick wall with my mother’s direct maternal line, so I would love to find out if I can get any further. If mtDNA on FTDNA will help me, I think I should do it. Is it good for breaking down brick walls? Thank you!

Susan/na Archer: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Archer-4361

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“ I've only tested through Family Tree DNA, so I can't compare to other test companies, but I have no issues with them!”. 

You can compare mtDNA (or Y-DNA) with other companies/labs if you upload your FTDNA results to mitoYDNA.org.  You can compare autosomal DNA and X-DNA with other companies/labs if you upload to GEDmatch.com or yourDNAportal.com.

mitoYDNA, GEDmatch and yourDNAportal are free.  Adding your mitoYDNA ID, GEDmatch ID, or yourDNAportal ID to WikiTree automatically associates your DNA with your ancestry in WikiTree.

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Peter, this is great to know! Thank you!!

Answer 3

Missy, in general the advice is to test the oldest family member(s) possible, but that makes a lot more difference for autosomal tests than Y-DNA or mtDNA, which go back a lot further in terms of their reliability.

FamilyTreeDNA is, as far as I know, the only major company offering tests other than autosomal.

In my experience, mtDNA has not been very useful in general, although it was extremely useful for the one purpose for which I bought it.  I had already identified a person who should be a match, based on our paper trails, but the paper trail had so far not been confirmed by autosomal results.  So, for targeted testing, I'd say it is worthwhile, but in the absence of that, maybe not.  (But if you're willing to spend some money, why not?  A match could always turn up.)

Comments

I agree my mtDNA test has not been very useful finding matches or confirming a certain surname.

My father's Y-DNA test confirmed no one slept with the neighbor or milkman.  I have since had autosomal surname matches but I was really starting to wonder.  It has not helped find any matches.

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I'm curious, do you not have a lot of mtDNA matches? Or is it just that it's hard to find your relationship to them? I ask because I was checking my matches yesterday and saw that I have 362 exact mtDNA matches. 

Of course the challenge is that even an exact mtDNA match can be quite a few generations out, so often you and your match won't have your lines figured out going far enough back to find your connection. I only have my maternal line back to my 5x great grandmother (and don't have a last name for her), and some of my matches have even less.

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I have 10 matches, all shown as 0 or 1 genetic distance.  Only two have provided an earliest known ancestor.  I don't recognize either early ancestor, not the names of any of my matches, and to be honest, have not spent a lot of time trying to figure them out.

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mtdna - I have 114 matches, only 2 are within 1 genetic distance (both have no names or trees). I do not recognize any names on any of the other matches.

on y-dna, I have one match that has 0 genetic distance up to the 67 marker, both of us has 8+ generation trees here, and it does not help. the common ancestor is further back beyond any known data.

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Ok, since I actually do not have the money, I should not really order the mtDNA test? I am dna confirmed back to my maternal 2nd great grandmother. Since her grandmother is a brick wall, would the mtDNA help to find my maternal 2nd great grandmother’s mother’s mother, Susan/na Archer? https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Archer-4361

If you understand that, you are in the right place!  Because I am not sure if I understand what I just wrote. 

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Julie, what does this mean? Please explain. “..., all shown as 0 or 1 genetic distance.”

How do they do this? “Only two have provided an earliest known ancestor.”

Thank you!!

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Missy, I just spent a half hour on the FamilyTreeDNA website, which was rather unhelpful.  (One example in their FAQ:  "How do I find the genealogical connection with my mtDNA match?  The only way to find a connection with your match is by comparing your genealogies.")

To answer your question about genetic distance, I consulted the ISOGG Genetics Glossary, which is a very good resource.  It says that genetic distance is:

"The number of differences, or mutations, between two sets of results. A genetic distance of zero means there are no differences in the results being compared against one another (exact match)."

If you're asking how people provide an earliest known ancestor, that is input in the Genealogy section of the Account Settings page on the website.  Turns out I hadn't done it myself.  I have now.

Also, by the way, the 10 matches I reported yesterday are using the "HVR1, HVR2, Coding regions" option.  If I use HVR1 only, I have 54 matches.  Don't ask me what those terms mean.  

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I don't have a deep understanding of the science, but basically HVR1, HVR2, and Coding Region are different parts of your mtDNA. If you test all of them, your results will be more specific. If you don't have the Coding Region, your matches might be VERY far away from you in the family tree. If you get the full sequence, then it becomes more genealogically relevant: an exact match on the full sequence means there's a 50% chance you're related within 5 generations. (I seem to recall there's a 90% chance of being within some larger number of generations but can't seem to find that number right now.)

Finding that connection if your tree doesn't go far enough is tough; there's no real way for DNA to make that easier. For example, if my tree goes to my 5x great grandmother, and I have a match whose tree goes to her 5x great grandmother, but our common ancestor is our 7x great grandmother, we have no way of knowing that. We just have to work on our trees more. DNA testing is for confirming what we've already researched more than it is for breaking brick walls. (But sometimes we'll find a match with someone, and they'll have our brick walls broken!)

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S Stevenson: It's interesting how people can have such different results in terms of number of matches. Like I've got loads of mtDNA exact matches for whatever reason, but my maternal grandpa, who I'd love to find ANY matches with, has zero exact yDNA matches! His handful of matches are all a genetic distance of 2 or more and have different last names. Not helpful! Although looking back through his tree it kind of makes sense; as far as I've gotten, each generation only had one son!

Answer 4

In my experience mtDNA is not particularly useful for genealogical purposes unless, as Julie mentioned, you have a specific goal in mind. By specific I mean very specific, not just a brick wall in your matrilineal line. For instance if there is someone you believe to be a 2nd or more distant cousin along all matrilineal lines (for both of you) then you could potentially significantly increase your confidence in that relationship with an exact mtDNA match. I say significantly increase your confidence rather than "prove" because even with an exact mtDNA match you need to go back 22 generations to reach a 95% confidence interval of having a specific common ancestor. For my money the three or four auDNA tests you could buy with the same money would almost certainly provide far more information than a single mtDNA test, especially if you have known relatives from the line(s) with your brick wall(s). You can check out this thread for some further advice.

If you still decide to do the mtDNA I'd definitely have your mom do it. There is some exceedingly small chance that there was a mutation between you and your mom (they have to happen somewhere) and if there was it would make for very confusing results, why take the chance?

And yes I'd agree that you are definitely not in a good place for proving your Sinclair line. Once again you can build some evidence through multiple triangulations and such but, unfortunately I'd have to say that proving the connection isn't very realistic.

Comments

Paul,

“ And yes I'd agree that you are definitely not in a good place for proving your Sinclair line. Once again you can build some evidence through multiple triangulations and such but, unfortunately I'd have to say that proving the connection isn't very realistic.” I was afraid of that! 

I did get 3 autosomal dna matches (on Ancestry) each for my third great grandfather, George W Sinclair, and two of his sisters, Abigail and Mary. If I can get those matches to upload their Ancestry dna results to GEDMatch, should I not POSSIBLY be able to get a triangulation?

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Missy, I think it would be worthwhile to get those matches to upload to GEDmatch, whether or not you find a triangulated group for yourself and some or all of them.  You might find someone else who shares a segment that you don't already know about.  And even if you don't, you will have that detail available while you seek additional matches.

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You're very lucky to have those matches! Hopefully that lucky streak will continue and your matches will agree to upload to GEDmatch. You can also do triangulation with MyHeritage now since they also provide information about your matches' matches with each other. It's a bit easier to work with than GEDmatch too. FTDNA doesn't provide information to do triangulation but at least they have a chromosome browser so you can tell if they all match you on the same segment. It would definitely be pretty good evidence of your Sinclair ancestry if they all triangulate. The downside is that you'd need to find matches who go back another generation to determine if the segment came from George, Abigail and Mary's father or mother. Of course there's a very high probability that they all had the same mother but the slight chance that one of them may have had a different father is one of the issues that introduces that small element of doubt, preventing the matches from providing absolute proof. It's too bad that Joshua Cilley Sinclair doesn't have any surviving descendants from his first marriage, half siblings can be a big help in isolating a common ancestor. Have you checked for matches with the two other Wikitree members who are descendants of Joshua Sinclair (b. 1760)? It's not very likely going that far back but it's worth a shot.

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Paul,

“ Have you checked for matches with the two other Wikitree members who are descendants of Joshua Sinclair (b. 1760)?”

Yes, I am actually 1C1R with one of them (we have been in contact and she knew my father, her 1st cousin. Our MRCAs are my great grandmother, Carlotta W Sinclair and Arthur H Brock.). The other one I did check on GEDMatch and no common DNA. 

Answer 5

If you have a paper tree with 2nd/3rd/4th cousins on the Sinclair side, you can confirm those connections with autosomal DNA.

The aim is to extend that cluster of confirmed connections backwards and outwards, up the Sinclair line, until you get an actual living male-line Sinclair in the cluster.  Not just a male descendant of a Sinclair, but a male line all the way down.

His yDNA can go to the surname project and will act as a proxy for all his confirmed cousins.

It might not be possible.  You can get descendant-trees rooted 6 generations back without a single male line down to anybody living.

First, do ordinary genealogy to extend your tree outwards and downwards, looking for living male-line Sinclairs within range of autosomal DNA.  Eg. go back up your male line to say Joshua https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Sinclair-6312.

Then go to his yDNA descendants chart

https://www.wikitree.com/treewidget/Sinclair-6312/890

Check all those people for any sons they might have had that are disconnected or don't have profiles.  Then try to extend all the lines down to living people (male lines only).

Comments

RJ,

I understood that and I can work on those. Thank you so much for explaining it out to me the way you did. I know where to go now and I have already started, but it seems that it is a Sinclair trait to have mostly girls!  Thank you again!