DNA tests have come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years and what is especially pleasing is the introduction of autosomal tests that tell you about every side of your family tree not just direct male relatives from your father's side or direct female relatives from your mother's side.
A while back, one of my direct relatives did the full test from Decodeme and it revealed we have some Eastern European ancestry using it's Map of Kinship feature which places you on a map of the world and you compare your position to those of other nationalities.
The image above is a snapshot of the European view of the Map of Kinship. It is very hard to get a proper view of where each person (represented by their countries flag of origin) sit on the map 2 dimensionally because this map can be rotated 3 dimensionally. I added arrows to show the trend of countries. Western Europeans are in blue going south and Eastern Europeans are in red going north. The two people next to my relative in pink are Polish and Polish descent. When the image is rotated, it appears my relative is drifting towards Eastern Europeans.
To back this up they were able to compare themselves to other customers using the genetic similarity tool and their top matches were to Britain, Russia, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine!
My relative is half British half unknown US and even more exciting was discovering on the advanced genome browser that she shares a segment with two people exactly in the same place who are of Ukrainian/Polish/Hungarian Ashkenazi descent together with another person who overlaps slightly who's ancestors lived in Hungary. They themselves have had a match to Ashkenazis but didn't think they had any Jewish ancestry.
A free database now exists where you can upload your Decodeme data. HIR search compares you to other people on it's database to find relatives. After some fiddling around with it, my relatives top matches are to people of British, German, Polish, Dutch and Ashkenazi origin! Not by massive amounts-I think we are talking 5th-10th cousins-but it's just another piece of evidence of unlocking the unknown American origins!
Fascinating stuff and even more exciting is the possibility of finding relatives through DNA testing. 23andme and FamilytreeDNA now both do a family/relative finder tool that puts you in touch with potentially fairly recent relatives. Both can also be uploaded to the HIR search site. Now I just need to decide which test to go for!
http://hirs.snpology.com/
