As others have pointed out, you must provide a good amount of saliva for these tests…..way more than a lizard could ever provide.
Yep, my FIL was adopted, and found his 2 siblings through 23andMe, after searching unsuccessfully for many years without submitting a saliva sample. He and his brother litterally look like twins, speak the same and have many of the same habits and interests.
After submitting my parent's DNA, I see many known relatives as matches. I also found out my estranged grandfather, who abandoned my grandmother while she was pregnant, wasn't my grandfather at all, and found a DNA match to mom's half sister who was born and raised in the same town. Go figure. So, yeah, it works pretty good in my experience, even uncovering grandma's little scandal from the past.
I’ve done ancestry and 23&me. I was able to determine my biological family as well. Neither uses swabs. Btw they pegged my ethnicity to a tee.
My husband did ancestry, we were able to determine what happened to his grandfather who his grandmother escaped from with the rest of her children. He remarried and had 2 more children. Irony of it was that my mil had a half brother she never knew about and they lived in the same area.
Ancestry was able to identify a small portion of native American, as well as indigenous central American. Plus the appropriate amounts of the various European peoples who settled the American colonies as well as Mexico.
True. No blood quantum for Cherokee tribal memberships. You must have direct lineage to a tribal member in Dawes Rolls.
I know a family in Stilwell, OK that some family member don’t speak English. They are not tribal members.
Their ancestors refused to put their names in the white man book.
Several of us in my family have done 23 and me, and same here. I got the notification from them that they’d “found” my mom and my dad (we all did the tests!), which was a bit amusing at the time, but I thought afterwards that had there been any unexpected surprises, that could have been more traumatic than fun.
I realized that when a more distant family member did ancestry, and was quite shocked to discover that her alleged grandfather was not actually related to her. Turns out that several of her aunts and uncles (large family) shared a different father, and that they had a whole host of other cousins via their biological grandfather. Came as quite the surprise!
We’ve also found some other surprises via the relatives feature! Mostly cousins that we didn’t know we had, and some were adopted and looking for relatives. Every time I get a close relative notification, so does either my mom or my dad, so I absolutely am certain that the results are legit.
Also, they’ve nailed our nationalities, with the one surprise of having a small amount of Native American ancestry, and haplogroup A2, which is NA and Inuit. My grandmother came here from Spain, so we think it somehow relates to the conquistadors taking Indian women as wives when they came to Florida, and bringing them back to Spain with them, it’s the only way we can think of how that came to be! Pretty cool anyway, however it happened. We’re watered down to just about 2% for my mom and 1% for me, but it’s still more than Fauxcahontas! And my dad came here from Ireland, and they got it right, right down to the towns. Pretty amazing. Well worth the fees!