Can you explain why the results of my DNA test don’t reflect my German ancestry?
QMy paternal great grandfather was born in Germany, but came over to England in the 1880s. I’ve not had much luck tracing his German heritage, so decided to take a 67-marker Y-chromosome DNA test with FamilyTreeDNA in the hopes it might connect me to other descendants of his German father. I don’t have any close matches in its database (just a genetic distance of 6 or 7) and I’m not seeing any German surnames. Does this suggest I don’t have German ancestors?
Philip Williams
AA Y-DNA test can sometimes provide clues to the biological surname of a direct paternal ancestor, but you really need to have close matches with only one or two mismatching markers. With a genetic distance of 6 or 7 you could potentially share a common ancestor with your matches 1,000 or more years ago and well before the surname era. Your current matches cannot therefore prove or disprove the hypothesis of German ancestry. Your results do stay in the database and it’s possible that you will get better matches in the future. To understand how Y-DNA matching works, see the article on paternal lineage testing in the FamilyTreeDNA Learning Center at learn.familytreedna. com/dna-basics/ydna. It includes a table that provides the probabilities of being related to a match within a given number of generations at different testing levels. In the meantime, if you want to find out if you have German heritage, you might consider taking an autosomal DNA test.
This will give you matches with genetic cousins, both male and female, on all of your ancestral lines, rather than restricting matching to males who share your direct paternal line. If your father does have German ancestry, you would expect to have matches with cousins with recent Germany ancestry and perhaps even some with German surnames. I would suggest starting with AncestryDNA ( ancestry.co.uk/dna).
It has the largest database, and recently launched its test in Germany. You can then transfer your raw data from AncestryDNA to both MyHeritage ( myheritage.com/dna/ upload) and FamilyTreeDNA ( familytree dna.com/autosomal-transfer) in order to benefit from additional cousin-matching databases. The MyHeritage transfer costs $29, but the FTDNA transfer is free. Debbie Kennett