How spitting in a tube with AncestryDNA helped us find our long lost relatives

If you’ve thought about tracing your family tree it’s a great time to start thanks to sites like Ancestry which has a number of ways to find your relatives including submitting your own DNA. 

And this week Ancestry is offering a discount to celebrate St Patrick’s Day with 30 per cent off the AncestryDNA kit – a saving of $45.

That offer is available until Sunday March 19.

Irish Australians have quite a heritage in Australia and have made an impact on our country’s history and culture.

The Ancestry site provides many resources for subscribers to trace their family history.

You can search various records like the census, births, deaths and marriages, military records and many, many more.

But the AncestryDNA kit can take that many steps further.

I got a chance to look at the kit and submitted my DNA.  And we got some surprising results.

Here’s how it works:

You order the AncestryDNA kit online (it’s usually $146 but with the St Patrick’s Day discount that comes down to $104) and it is mailed out to you.

When you receive it you send in the code with the kit to activate it.

Inside the kit is a small plastic tube and the next step is to deposit some if your saliva in there. That’s right you need to spit in a tube.

Next step is to seal it up in the supplied packaging and send it back Ancestry.
You’ll receive a confirmation email that they’ve received your sample and another to let you know when they start working on it.

Your DNA is analysed at more than 700,000 markers.

In a few weeks you get your results – and that’s when they will blow your mind.

For our results, I saw my ethnicity estimate had me mainly from Italy and Greece (71 per cent), Middle East (15 per cent) and traces of other regions including North Africa.

That’s pretty accurate when you take into account my Maltese background. I was born in Australia but my parents were born in Malta.

The results also showed all the DNA matches with other Ancestry subscribers.

It showed three people who could be second or third cousins and more than 400 other people who were fourth to sixth cousins.

I have already been contacted by people whose results I showed up in as well so it can lead to easily finding long lost relatives and filling in the gaps in your family tree.

If you serious about tracing your family tree, the best place to start is Ancestry.

www.ancestry.com.au