Time certainly flies. I find it hard to believe that genetic testing aimed at genealogists has been around for ten years. A decade ago DNA tests were rarely seen on TV and broadly unused outside of academia. Roll forward to today, and no one researching their family history can remain unaware of DNA testing for very long. Even Ancestry has finally started offering cut-price DNA tests, chasing the coat tails of the market leader, Houston-based Family Tree DNA, which boasts nearly 150,000 Y-chromosome results and more than 5,000 surname projects.
Yet despite all this activity by family historians, there’s a great deal that we’ve been taking on trust during the past decade.
Firstly, there have been very few write ups of surname-linked DNA projects, even in academia. Most activity has been led by family historians outside of it, but only a few of us have ever tried to write up our results in a way that allows outsiders to compare one surname project with another. And then there are lots of assumptions and variables within the process of analysing a set of DNA results that still have to be quantified or proved.
That situation is in the process of changing, but even as it improves, it reminds us again that DNA testing is just a tool used by family historians, not an end in itself.
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