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How to Help the Crow DNA Study

 My work in the Crow Project has focused on the use of Y-DNA. This specialized test is different than the at home commercial DNA test you have surely heard of. Both tests are extremely useful. Y-DNA is wonderful for matching just the male Y chromosome to others in terms of thousands of years. The autosomal DNA test looks at the 22 autosomes and is great for family matching going back six or so generations. This test is the one where you receive an ethnicity reading of all your family lines. 

Many have tested their Y chromosome with our Crow Y-DNA Project at Family Tree DNA. The issue many of you have is that you do not have a male relative that carries the the surname Crow for Y-DNA testing. Or that the cost of the more expensive Y-DNA test is out of your financial reach. This is where the autosomal test can help our study. On sale, the autosomal test typical runs between 59.00 and 79.00 US dollars. The next big sale runs in November. Even if a family member has already tested, it is still worth testing yourself. This is because we inherit different genes from our parents and ancestors. Lets say you and brother test, but your brother has more Crow matches than you and has a slightly different ethnicity reading, this is not because the test is incorrect, it is because you simply inherited slightly different segments of DNA during the DNA recombination process. You receive 50% of one parents DNA, your sibling may not inherit the same 50% as you do. 

I'll list here some step's on how to move forward with testing. This is the best path forward financially speaking to get the most out of your money.


1. Test with https://www.ancestry.com/. This company has a good ethnicity reading but more importantly, a very large database of testers. The last count I saw was in excess of 20 million people. 

Once you receive your ancestry result in a month or so time, you then can upload your DNA to several other sites for free. Some companies require a fee to unlocking your ethnicity reading, but you will be able to view your cousins list for free. You do not have to spend the money on unlocking the reading if you are not interested. 


2. Upload your ancestry DNA to My Heritage for free. https://www.myheritage.com/dna. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqhTn4NBvkU


3. Upload your ancestry DNA  to FTDNA for free. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0v_cJvgtuI


4. Upload your ancestry DNA  to Gedmatch for free https://www.gedmatch.com/ . This site is import because you can view the actual segments of DNA you share with others. Very important for the chromosome mapping tool many of us more serious researchers use for identifying matches in our quest to rebuild the family tree. Once you have uploaded to Gedmatch, you can then join the Crow ancestor project that I manage there. We have several dozen members joined there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80VsX1hTTPk


5. Ensure to build out a family tree on ancestry and make it public. You can then upload your tree to other sites. It is important to fill out the tree the best you can, you can do this without purchasing a membership. If you just testing for your own curiosity and to help this study, then make sure you do not get roped into a monthly payment. 

If you follow these steps, this would be extremely  helpful to further our Project. You will also save quite a bit of money. For the price of one kit, you will have access to four databases of users in excess of 30 million testers. Each company also has different algorithms they use, so you might have a few matches show up that might not have otherwise shown up on ancestry 

The Crow Y-DNA Project does accept donations. So if you would like to get a kit upgraded or represented in the Project, we can help facilitate that purchase through the Project 

https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/crow-dna/about/background

If you need any guidance, feel free to reach out.


Mike Crow 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/515337538948320

mikec1120@comcast.net

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