Your dna questions answered

Why do people take a DNA test? Perhaps they have a brick wall where paper research has stalled? There might be an illegitimate ancestor? Or they might have been adopted or only know one parent? Even i

B ack in August 2025 I did a ‘learn-along’ in DNA club, where I asked which areas of DNA people wanted to look at in more depth. I was expecting the webinar to focus on skills like clustering, but one

Q My ancestor, Charles Hayes, was born on 6 October 1700 in Harrow on the Hill to Charles Hayes and Ann Ewster. He attended University College Cambridge and, described as “one of the Gentlemen of the

When researching civil birth, marriage and death records in England and Wales, you should always start at FreeBMD. Created by volunteers in 1998, it has records from 1837 and remains completely free.

The elevator pitch made this trip sound very glamorous, but it’s nearing 43ºC and I’ve been stooping around in the desert for over an hour, eyes fixed on the arid earth. We’re in the Turkana Basin in

Reality is far stranger than fiction, and this is certainly true of my family history. I am one of seven American children born to Hungarian physicians Clara and Julian Ambrus who grew up in Budapest