On Tuesday, May 31, 2016 at 12:41:10 PM UTC-4, Andrew Lancaster via wrote: > taf wrote: > To have a quick rant: I think think profit promotion has been part of > the reason customers have had autosomal testing so heavily promoted, > much to the detriment of Y DNA. Autosomal testing is more useful for > ethnic ancestry approximation, but Y DNA (STR testing) has achieved the > most for normal genealogy. Perhaps, but both have been useful. Y-DNA testing has been useful to connect individuals genealogically back 10,11, maybe 15 generations back or more. autosomal DNA testing has been useful to me to prove/connect to individuals on a must more recent timescale (5 or 6 generations back with confidence). So, Y-DNA has a lot more depth on the chart, but autosomal has much more bredth in lieu of depth. Both useful, but in different ways.

On Tuesday, May 31, 2016 at 9:53:17 AM UTC-7, joe...@gmail.com wrote: > > Perhaps, but both have been useful. Y-DNA testing has been useful to connect individuals genealogically back 10,11, maybe 15 generations back or more. > > autosomal DNA testing has been useful to me to prove/connect to individuals on a must more recent timescale (5 or 6 generations back with confidence). > > So, Y-DNA has a lot more depth on the chart, but autosomal has much more bredth in lieu of depth. > > Both useful, but in different ways. I think Andrew was talking about a different type of autosomal analysis than you are. He was talking about SNP analysis used to determine ethnic proportions - basically useless for genealogy unless you don't know if your grandfather was a Finn or an Italian and you know everyone else is neither. What is more useful is the autosomal SNP clustering analysis that looks at conserved islands of contiguous DNA and can tell you someone is related to you within about a half-dozen generations. While it has limits, that can be useful data, though it proves no specific connection. taf