This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Author: RichardDale1972 Surnames: Dale Classification: queries Message Board URL: http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.dale/1250.1.1/mb.ashx Message Board Post: Hi Jackie, Here's my summary of DNA testing. Y-DNA testing. For males only. Assists in identifying a common paternal male ancestor (ie father, grandfather, GGfather etc.) up to 22 generations back. This is great for surname testing. If you're female, have your father, brother or paternal uncle take this test. FTDNA is my tester of choice for this. Results can be entered into Ancestry and y-search to find more results. mt-DNA testing allows you to test for a common ancestor along the maternal line. Both males and females can take this. This is not at all useful for surname testing. FTDNA is my tester of choice for this. Autosomonal DNA testing allows you to test all pedigrees back 4-5 generations and find matches. Ancestry DNA has a large US database of these, but not many tools. FTDNA has a reasonable size database. Ancestry results can be exported and imported to FTDNA (for a fee). Also GEDmatch, a free tool, accepts the import of Ancestry and FTDNA Autosomonal DNA results. My preferred path right now, since I'm a big ancestry user, is to do the autosomonal DNA test on ancestry and also pay to have them included on FTDNA. FTDNA and GedMatch offer chromosome viewing capabilities so that if you get multiple confirmed matches, you can start to identify which patches of DNA match on which chromosomes and infer that new matches with similar characteristics are likely to come from those confirmed pedigree lines. Unfortunately Ancestry is only currently selling autosomonal DNA tests to US residents. Call them to complain! I've done all three DNA tests. Important Note: The author of this message may not be subscribed to this list. If you would like to reply to them, please click on the Message Board URL link above and respond on the board.