Hello all, I am forwarding this message from the Swedish list because I think there may be answers here as to what the best place to have DNA testing done would be. Many different sites have been mentioned as part of this list ongoing discusson. I've looked at the site and feel a lot more confidence in the products they offer. Lois Casson -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [SWEDEN] DNA--my family's choice for DNA tests and our surprising results Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 18:18:40 -0400 (GMT-04:00) From: <gwendaelin@mindspring.com> Reply-To: gwendaelin@mindspring.com, sweden@rootsweb.com To: sweden@rootsweb.com I have been reading your posts about DNA and thought I might add my family's DNA experience to the list. My brother is a doctor and he is very interested in reading and researching about DNA. He choose genebase.com to test our DNA.http://www.genebase.com/. (I know that there are other good sites as well.) You can do a family tree online with it but it is more for yourself than anyone else. My father is pure Swedish. My brother tested, himself, for our mDNA and our Swedish yDNA and our father to get our Swedish grandmother's mDNA. He wanted to see if our grandmother's ancestors were hunter-gatherers or farmers when they first came to Sweden. Our yDNA established us right in the central part of Sweden which was correct for our heritage. They then told us who else matched with our yDNA, especially some famous people such as Henning Mankell and a coworker's ancestor. I knew who he was because I had done her genealogy tree for her on ancestry.com. Because our Swedish surname changed every generation there was very little chance of matching to others according to surname. My brother tested his French wife's brother and found that their yDNA is Minoan. This was quite a surprise but it makes sense since their father came from the lower Atlantic coast of France. The Minoans would have sailed across the Mediterranean Sea and below Spain and Portugal and up the French coast to settle. Their mDNA was typical for females of central Europe. Below is my mDNA story that is very interesting and might encourage someone to get their DNA done. It really proves that one never really knows all the genealogical answers. I thought my mDNA was going to be middle European/German but I could not have been more wrong. It did help for me to know our family history so when we did not get the answer we expected I knew why. My brother went back did the most expensive test for us, after the first initial test, because our mDNA turned out to be very different and more difficult to figure out than most. It is very rare because there are very few matches. When he did the extended test we found out that our maternal ancestors came from the Hebrides Islands off Scotland where the Irish/Scottish monks were doing illuminated writing. This was very strange news because my maternal line goes straight back to Germany. The amazing thing is that my maternal great grandmother came from Schotten, Germany and Schotten means Scotland in German. It was settled, by invitation of Charlemagne, in 1279 by Ionian/Hebrides monks. This means that my maternal ancestors were part of the entourage that traveled with the monks from the Hebrides Islands to Schotten, Germany and they never left the town until my maternal great grandmother left in the 1880's. There were very few matches to us probably because people living on the Hebrides Islands or in the highlands of Scotland are not very busy worrying about their DNA. It is just too bad that we didn't do this before my mother died, a few years ago, because she would have been fascinated with our discovery. Now we have to plan a family trip to the Hebrides and Scotland. Hopefully some of you will want to see if you have any surprise DNA stories and try it yourselves. Gwenda Elin Gustafaon Malnati