To celebrate reaching the milestone of having processed more than 1,000,000 DNA tests, FTDNA is offering their Family Finder autosomal DNA test at a discounted rate of only $79 US for the week of Father’s Day.
Family Finder is an autosomal DNA test that automatically finds your relatives within 5 generations. It works by comparing your DNA to the DNA of other users in our massive database.
What is Autosomal DNA?
In autosomal DNA testing, the number and size of matching runs of DNA from one point to another is compared to compute the likely number of generations between two samples. Your DNA is organized into 23 pairs of chromosomes with half of each chromosome pair coming from your mother and the other half from your father. However, before these chromosomes were passed from your parents to you, the contents were shuffled in a process called “recombination”. This recombination is the reason that you are not an exact replica of your sibling. Each of your parents also received half of their DNA from their parents or your grandparents. Because you received your DNA from your parents, your DNA will also contain large portions of your grandparent’s DNA but smaller portions from your great-grandparents and less yet from your great-great-grandparents and so on.
Since the same inheritance of DNA happened for all of your relatives, it is possible to estimate the degree of relationship you share by comparing DNA samples. Close relatives will share large portions of DNA while less closely related family members will share smaller portions of DNA.
Why Should You get Tested?
Autosomal DNA could help you break down a brick wall by finding distant cousins with shared ancestors. It could help to confirm family relationships when no definitive documentation can be found. It could connect you with that one descendant of your ancestors that inherited the family bible, the family documents and all the old photographs!
Image Credits: samarttiw on freedigitalphotos.net
