DNA Test to Find my Father.
Using your DNA to find your Father is a great idea but it is not as simple as you might first think.
It’s really important to understand the process of a DNA test and what information it might reveal about you and your father.
There are two types of DNA tests that you can do. One through companies like Ancestry who will then put you in touch with your DNA matches, it is this type of test that this article is focused on.
If you have found your father already and both have questions or doubts, then you can both take a DNA test and see if you match together. This article is not about that.
So, lets assume you don’t have any information about your father. Well, the good news is that you can still find him, its not easy though (well not usually anyway) and it can take years to research and get to the bottom of but through companies such as ourselves you can find him.
If someone like you comes to us to find their father when they have no information about him then we immediately ask them to do an Ancestry DNA test. We use Ancestry because most people do so the DNA matches are more likely via their platform. They also allow you to upload your DNA to other DNA websites such as 23andMe.
DNA test to find my father’s Ancestry
We sent you an Ancestry test in the post and you provide a saliva sample and send it directly back to Ancestry. They take around 6 weeks to analyse your DNA and then email you to tell you it has been uploaded to their database.
At that point, if you are using our service then you’d get in touch with us and we can start to manage your DNA matches or you can do this yourself.
You log on to their platform and you can immediately learn more about your genetic makeup and you will be inundated with matches. Some at the top will be your closed matches and further down they will be less close in terms of how much DNA you share. You might find you have a very close match, and you can differentiate between paternal and maternal matches, basically who is on which side of your family tree.
How Close are the DNA Matches
Now the closer the matches the more likely you are to recognise the name and know if it’s your mothers family line or your fathers, may that is via a process of elimination. If you don’t recognise close matches, then you might be able to contact them directly and ask if they are related to your father. This is where you need a professional to make contact, often we can do the trace work without contacting your close matches as in some cases this can worry them, they might not respond.
Often the matches are not close enough to make a direct assessment of who your father is and that when we take the search in a different direction. We can build your family tree, focusing on your paternal line i.e your fathers family line. This can help us build a picture of your fathers’ side of the family and from this we can usually ascertain who your father ‘could’ be. Sometimes it might be over two generations or even two brothers, but we can get a steer on who your father is, but then what!?
What happens when it gets really complicated!
Well that’s where things can get really complicated (we told you it wasn’t always easy). So next we have to trace these names that we have researched on to the family line to actual addresses and then we need to act as an intermediary to make first contact with them. At that point we are in a delicate situation of asking people if they could be someone’s (your) father. This needs to be done by a trained person who can deal with an issues that might cause so we use Intermediary counsellors to do that part of the search. This whole process can take many months and it’s not always successful but with a fair wind we can usually solve these complex cases.
So, if you do not know who your father is then please don’t worry, you are not alone. Even within our team of 8 people here at Relative Connections there are two of us who have either never met or have very limited contact with our fathers, so we know what you are feeling. That is why we want to help. If you’d like to know more about our services and prices, then please do get in touch we would be delighted to help you with a DNA test to find your father.