Regardless of how you feel about the Ancestry site, it is the prime target of your search due mostly to the fact it has over 5 million subscribers, which is 5 million people to match your DNA against. Other important feature are the fact that you can download your DNA data and that many DNA matching sites,tools, and family tree sites accept the Ancestry DNA file as an upload. This means one test at Ancestry can work them all, well almost all.

At $59 dollars when on sale, which is often, this is the cheapest and quickest way to jumpstart your search.

​

The test takes about 6 weeks to process. In the meantime make sure to set up a free "family tree" on ancestry as well. You probably have nothing to put in it yet, so just label a spot for you as "me unknown" (if you are searching for your birth family) and then two parents "father unknown", "mother unknown". Guess their birth years as well, you only need to be within ten years to activate Ancestrys search functions. As an added tip,mark them "deceased" and use a fake date (I use 12/21/12 as that was the Mayan end of the world date). This trick "turns on" searches that normally are not available to you like the social security application database, which can seriously help decoding birth mothers multiple marriages. You can always "bring them back to life" when you have all the info from Ancestry.This trick likely works on other tree sites as well. Ancestry will then ask if you want to save this tree, give it a unique name and make it "public" (make all your data, especially DNA, public to help matching, "private" trees are a nightmare as you will soon see).

​

When you get your results,if you are lucky, you may find some "close relatives" (over 600 dna shared) or first cousins. This is pretty rare though. Most of the time you may get a few second cousins and a few dozen third cousins. This is why you need a "family tree". Now is the time to get 6 months of Ancestry subscription, just the US (cheapest) one. This will turn on their automatic tree searching and matching which will speed you through this search.

Take your closest match and build your tree for them. Put their name and data in where you had "me unknown". If their own tree shows up on the match and it is not "private", you may directly see their family data to add into the tree you are making on them (screenshots help here). Basically, you will be building trees for some of your closest matches. Ancestry has some tools to help as well. Try "thrulines" and "shared" as well.