Testing Cousins for DNA

[pennywise]

I've read on a Lost Cousins newsletter that it's a good idea to encourage other family members to take a DNA test or buy them an ancestry.co DNA test as a present.

What I don't understand is what then happens to the ancestry DNA test if the relative in question is happy to take the a test but is not currently researching their Tree and does not have a subscription to ancestry.co. Can I use the DNA kit results on my Tree? If so, what would I need to do?

 

[Pauline]

I've read on a Lost Cousins newsletter that it's a good idea to encourage other family members to take a DNA test or buy them an ancestry.co DNA test as a present.

What I don't understand is what then happens to the ancestry DNA test if the relative in question is happy to take the a test but is not currently researching their Tree and does not have a subscription to ancestry.co. Can I use the DNA kit results on my Tree? If so, what would I need to do?

When doing the DNA test, your cousin would need to set up a free guest account at Ancestry, or allow you to do it for them. Once their results are available on the website, then from their account, they can invite you to be a manager or viewer of their results, giving you access to them via your own Ancestry account, just as with your own results.

Ancestry support pages have more on this - see, for example, https://support.ancestry.co.uk/s/article/Assigning-a-Manager-to-Your-AncestryDNA-Test

 

[pennywise]

Thanks for your helpful reply. My cousin is quite elderly and doesn't have an internet connection or email. It does look as if I could register a new email address with a provider such as Gmail and register a new Ancestry.co guest account myself and use that for her DNA result. Do you think that would work, or have I misunderstood?

 

[Pauline]

It does look as if I could register a new email address with a provider such as Gmail and register a new Ancestry.co guest account myself and use that for her DNA result. Do you think that would work, or have I misunderstood?

Provided your cousin is agreement, then setting up a guest account in their name and on their behalf should be fine. However, you will be able to make better use of the results with an Ancestry subscription, so assuming you have a subscription on your own Ancestry account, then it would be best to make yourself a manager of the results. That would allow you to view and manage your cousin's results through your own account and use of your subscription.

 

[peter]

Although testing cousins is usually key to knocking down 'brick walls' choosing the right cousins is important. There are two key benefits to cousins testing: one is that they will get matches on the lines you share which aren't on your list, the other is that they'll get matches on the lines you share which are on your list.

The former expands the pool of matches that you can fish in for clues, the latter helps you zero in on the matches that may help you knock down the 'brick wall(s)' that you share. The relative importance of these depends on the nature of the 'brick wall' - for example, if you have an illegitimate ancestor you probably don't know the name of his father, so having more matches isn't much help - what you need are clues to what his surname might have been.

However if you're in a situation where you have too many possible baptisms to choose from, what you really need is a match with someone descended from a sibling of one of the possibles. So more matches may help.

Most of my cousins who have tested are 3rd cousins, with a few 2nd cousins once removed. Closer cousins generally share too many lines with you to be much help in knocking down 'brick walls'; more distant cousins are less unlikely to have shared matches. But if you're determined to knock down a specific 'brick wall', every cousin helps.

Of course, the best cousins are the ones who have already tested, so be nice to the cousins who are your matches at Ancestry - and they may agree to make you a Viewer or even a Collaborator.