Do you have an mtDNA Success Story?

[loisrp]

hi iam ritu born in india but indian parents and public didnot treat me well so I had my ancestry dna test done it says Iam 46 percent european 28 percent east asian 24% subsaharan african 2% indigenous american and thus I came to know why Iam treated badly by indian parents and public. Now I am looking for my true parents kins and race freinds .please help me.ask if anybody with my dna type lost a kin since 1967.

Do you mean you are not biologically related to your Indian parents? When you talk about "lost a kin", do you think your biological parents "lost" you somehow and you ended up in an Indian family?

This is a fascinating, though tragic, story, and I hope you get some answers.

[rmm0484]

hi iam ritu born in india but indian parents and public didnot treat me well so I had my ancestry dna test done it says Iam 46 percent european 28 percent east asian 24% subsaharan african 2% indigenous american and thus I came to know why Iam treated badly by indian parents and public. Now I am looking for my true parents kins and race freinds .please help me.ask if anybody with my dna type lost a kin since 1967.

You need to say which tests you took, and which DNA type you are. In other words, Y test was taken, Haplogroup whatever...do you match any surnames in particular? Please know that the DNA combines differently in families, so you could look different from your sister or brother. Also, you sound like that you are an interesting mixture, so do not let anyone disrespect for what you appear to be.

[ritu]

hi iam ritu born in india but indian parents and public didnot treat me well so I had my ancestry dna test done it says Iam 46 percent european 28 percent east asian 24% subsaharan african 2% indigenous american and thus I came to know why Iam treated badly by indian parents and public. Now I am looking for my true parents kins and race freinds .please help me.ask if anybody with my dna type lost a kin since 1967.

[abuelita]

A brief note, to all good people out there looking for relatives do not give up.
Mine is a Y-DNA story. I was born in England in 1945 my biological father was an American Airman who went back went back to the States at the end of the war, leaving my mother unmarried and having to rear me by herself.
I did a 37 marker test at the end of 2015 and discovered he came from Alabama, and unfortunately had died in 1996.
I hoped on a plane to Alabama and met a half brother, his son, who I am still in contact with.
So even after 70 years things still happen.
I am prepared to elaborate on this story if anyone is interested.

I'm interested. I found this very touching.

[Philip591]

Biological Father

A brief note, to all good people out there looking for relatives do not give up.
Mine is a Y-DNA story. I was born in England in 1945 my biological father was an American Airman who went back went back to the States at the end of the war, leaving my mother unmarried and having to rear me by herself.
I did a 37 marker test at the end of 2015 and discovered he came from Alabama, and unfortunately had died in 1996.
I hoped on a plane to Alabama and met a half brother, his son, who I am still in contact with.
So even after 70 years things still happen.
I am prepared to elaborate on this story if anyone is interested.

Regards Philip Smithers

[DWFlineage]

Thanks for sharing this story

The enemy commander boasted to his troops it would take One Million Men, One Hundred Years to overcome his Pacific Island atoll fortress. Two years of much forced labor construction on the atoll of Tarawa had convinced him the atoll could not be 'taken' by American or Allied forces during WW2.

Enter the United States Marines! In three days and four hours the Island atoll and airstrip was in Allied hands and the boastful enemy commander lay mortally wounded among the dead.

Two weeks ago an FTDNA cousin of mine received a message on her ancestry dot com page. It was from a group of volunteers for the Marines in Quantico, VA.

They said they were using ancestry dot com in an attempt to locate a living female relative of American Marine, Bob Doil Herman. PvtFC Marine Herman died in the Sands of Tarawa on Nov. 20, 1943. His remains were lost to time for 72 years! Recently, volunteers located remains which they believe could belong to cousin Bob. They told my FTDNA cousin they would need a living female born of a surname female of Bob's maternal line for a mtDNA test to ID the remains. My FTDNA cousin or I did not qualify but we located a living female relative who matched their needs.

Marine Herman's remains will be returning to the Land and Liberty he defended and the World he, in part, helped save.

We are so grateful for the field of genealogy and DNA sites. Who knows if the tests we take today will help unknown future family members in ways we cannot imagine?

Thank You FTDNA

What a wonderful story, thanks for sharing this.

Best regards, Doug(Veteran)

[Sivsdotter]

I haven't found anyone through hits yet, not the FF nor the mtDNA test, but I didn't take the mtDNA test to find relatives, but to find out where my mum's female line came from. We know nothing about them and there's been a lot of speculation. Now we know we were all wrong. When I got the results on the FF test I had several hits that no one in the family could explain and since I don't have a Y chromosome my only option to gain some clarity was the mtDNA. The result blew us away and I, my mother, her sisters and my cousins on that side look at each other with new eyes. Finding people through written records has over the years been very difficult (I have relatives who's been trying for decades) so getting this information will be a great help in pointing us in the right direction, what to look for. And the fact that we must look in records elsewhere in Europe, and not at all in a direction we expected.

I think it depends on what you expect from it. I didn't do any of the tests to find relatives, but to find out what my genes say. It's been so difficult to find anything in the written records on my family but the tests shed light on from where my ancestors came. Comparing that to our modern history I can now at least figure out what drove my ancestors across the continent and approximately when. For someone who can't find much elsewhere, that's a big thing.

[kora]

I do have a success story. I found the maiden name of my great-grandmother and the place of her birth, via Family Finder, but for this I had to test my uncle, because my own match was "confirmed", but not that significant. I am very thankful to FTDNA, I would have not gotten the same information with any other commercial company, because, it seems, many people prefer FTDNA when it comes to genealogy. Testing costs, but on the positive side, if all archives are another country and not digitized, you depend on researchers, and it is a very subjective factor.

It is a story that truly started with the DNA match, and nothing else, and I am thankful to FTDNA. I was getting tired of posting gripes!

[dna]

A success story from Central Europe

There are two cousins in my family: L. & M. Since going to the girls school together, they were told that they were cousins, but since they were very good friends, they never paid close attention to their blood relationship details.

Hardships of the years post the World War II made family contacts more difficult, older ones who knew about relationships died, families migrated to different regions, etc.

Decades passed, enter modern genealogy research . How are you related? We are cousins through the P. family. An instant setback, it is a fairly popular family name around the city they were born. And two immediate problems, neither L. nor M. knew anybody living from the P. family, and the family name spelling they remembered varied considerably. After years of reading incomplete (two world wars) parish records (I was the lucky one who did not need to read them ), it turned up that in the 19th century in some P. families, some children adopted a different spelling (a very interesting story by itself). Still no trace of any common ancestry, as M. was not sure of the exact spelling of the maiden name of her maternal grandmother and the original marriage records are thought to be destroyed. After using 19th century records to draw a fairly complete tree of the P. family branch to which L. belongs, the search was stopped.

In recent years, I started feeling confident about genetic genealogy and mentioned in a family discussion that we should ask L. and M. to test, so we could confirm whether the families are related or it was just a school friendship . We are looking again into charts and the eureka moment: M.'s maternal grandfather's surname is S., and one of L.'s ancestors in her maternal line is S.! Back to church records! Now, when scanning the records looking for the S. surname, L. & M. were found to be 3rd cousins once removed with common ancestors M.S. & T.D.

However, the paper trail also confirmed that M.'s maternal grandmother surname was indeed P. (no marriage or birth record though). The same spelling variant as L.'s maternal great-grandmother! Could they been sisters? Family Finder and mtDNA to the rescue. Family Finder gave shared DNA larger than the average 2nd cousins once removed due to additional 3rd cousins relationship (it actually was as if the cM values were added ) and the fairly rare mtDNA was found to be identical. L. & M. have no exact HVR1 matches, but themselves, and their FMS results at GD=2 have a family from Finland, and at GD=3 a family from Lithuania.

We entered M.'s maternal grandmother into P. family tree. A success, after 40 years

W. (Mr.)

[dna]

Would a unique mutation in the coding region count as a success story? And by Unique I mean, Unique as in no one ELSE THUS TESTED in my Haplogroup (U3a1c)(according to my Group Project admin) has it?? I was told that later in the future if others within my Haplogroup who also carry this unique mutation also are found it would mean that we are more closely related within U3a1c which I think is pretty frigin cool! (and thus worth the money I have spent lol) (My 74 year old mother thought this was amazing as well!)

I think the original meaning was about finding somebody or confirming a relationship by means of mtDNA testing.

Your or your mother (I am not clear whether both of you tested) mutation is the coding region might not be a success story by itself, however it might mean that any exact matches would be fairly closely related to you. And finding a close relative will be a success story.

W. (Mr.)

[LadyAlaise]

Back mutations (reversions) create more severe problems (as compared to Y-DNA) when analyzing mtDNA for genealogy and ancestry since mtDNA is really small...

W.

Would a unique mutation in the coding region count as a success story? And by Unique I mean, Unique as in no one ELSE THUS TESTED in my Haplogroup (U3a1c)(according to my Group Project admin) has it?? I was told that later in the future if others within my Haplogroup who also carry this unique mutation also are found it would mean that we are more closely related within U3a1c which I think is pretty frigin cool! (and thus worth the money I have spent lol) (My 74 year old mother thought this was amazing as well!)

[Mud Clerk]

Historical Event and mtDNA

The enemy commander boasted to his troops it would take One Million Men, One Hundred Years to overcome his Pacific Island atoll fortress. Two years of much forced labor construction on the atoll of Tarawa had convinced him the atoll could not be 'taken' by American or Allied forces during WW2.

Enter the United States Marines! In three days and four hours the Island atoll and airstrip was in Allied hands and the boastful enemy commander lay mortally wounded among the dead.

Two weeks ago an FTDNA cousin of mine received a message on her ancestry dot com page. It was from a group of volunteers for the Marines in Quantico, VA.

They said they were using ancestry dot com in an attempt to locate a living female relative of American Marine, Bob Doil Herman. PvtFC Marine Herman died in the Sands of Tarawa on Nov. 20, 1943. His remains were lost to time for 72 years! Recently, volunteers located remains which they believe could belong to cousin Bob. They told my FTDNA cousin they would need a living female born of a surname female of Bob's maternal line for a mtDNA test to ID the remains. My FTDNA cousin or I did not qualify but we located a living female relative who matched their needs.

Marine Herman's remains will be returning to the Land and Liberty he defended and the World he, in part, helped save.

We are so grateful for the field of genealogy and DNA sites. Who knows if the tests we take today will help unknown future family members in ways we cannot imagine?

Thank You FTDNA

[mollyblum]

While this is not exactly a success story- I would not exactly say it is a poor investment. Certainly if you are using it to help w a paper trail or find other relatives but it helps confirm ancestry and can confirm where a maternal line comes from. I did mine to see if our Jewish line was confirmed genetically and if it would clarify if we were Ashkenazi or Sephardic. My maternal line was K1a1b1a which confirmed that the maternal line has been Jewish for thousands of years. Behar has done an article on this haplogroup which gave me more insight into my origins. However, I had no (and still don't) aspirations of finding any kind of relatives with an MtDNA profile. I really don't think that is what it is for.

However, about 80-90% of my matches seem to be from the same region in the Ukraine near the shtetl where my ggreatgrandmother lived so I suppose it is possible to find a relation.

But people forget about adoption cases where MtDNA can be very helpful. Certainly not a wasted investment!

[Tenn4ever]

If you are parsing your dollars I would not do this test. Spend you money on Y tests or even on paying for cousins testing for you with the FF or Y tests.

I guess it could depend on your own personal situation but I already had my paper trail documented back about eleven generations on my mother's direct line. It was my 2nd most documented line of my gg-grandparents. The mtDNA test did nothing to further that line.

I might add I'm not interested in anthropology particularly. If that's your bent then maybe you may like this test but if it's for genealogy furtherance I would not bother. It can confirm a line but otherwise not much help.

Plus, I might add it's one of the more expensive tests...your money is better spent elsewhere.

[dna]

Elise -

Some members of the mtDNA Haplogroup I Project have reported genealogical success stories. I will contact the ones I remember and ask them to write to you. :-)

Actually, in my opinion, full-sequence testing is always a success story. That's because those results permanently enable testers to find exactly where they belong on the mtDNA tree. Even if it does not add names to a tester's family tree, knowing their specific subclade sets the stage for them to learn more about the origins, later migrations, and historical events affecting a segment of their ancestry. Personally, I have always been curious and interested in knowing the whereabouts and circumstances of my ancestors 2,000+ years ago.

For some subclades, a marvelous and gratifying amount of information is already known. For others, new information will be discovered in time as data accumulates. This field is still young, and the mtDNA tree has much more growing to do.

- Martha Hicks

Back mutations (reversions) create more severe problems (as compared to Y-DNA) when analyzing mtDNA for genealogy and ancestry since mtDNA is really small...

W.