FamilyTreeDNA Tracking Order Status

I have paid for all these kits over years, the last two recently. I want access to the older ones. No go. They are kits number: Kit Numbers: 269946, 525047, 787326, B131613, B175103, IN34979, IN34981, IN36988. What has happened to them. Were they deleted?

As someone who didn't know much about his family history, FTDNA helped me discover more about my roots and ancestors. As a male, Big Y was an amazing tools that helped me understand where my ancestors migrated from. :)

Their game changer Big Y-700 test helped me breakthrough a brick wall I had in my ancestry with a 3rd and 6th Great Grand-Father. The Big Y and mtDNA tests with accompanying tools are it's strength. I recommend you go all they way with your Y-DNA testing with the Big Y and not settle for the lesser tests.

Is really the only Y-DNA site (for males only), even worth considering testing at. They by and far, have the largest Y-DNA database so most people will get their closest matches. There are other test sites like Y-Seq, and others, but FTDNA does not allow uploads of Y-DNA results (Exactly like Ancestry does not allow Autosomal uploads from other sites). One thing you can do is take your FTDNA results and upload to Yfull.com, this is especially useful for folks over on the Europe side, as well as picking up additional testers from a variety of other Y-DNA test sites. The Y-DNA testing is much more involved than the quick and dirty and very low cost Autosomal test (different type of DNA), and is quite a lot of lab work. Personally, with the much higher volume of testers, more automated labs, and all that, the prices should have easily dropped to half by now, but since they are the 800 lbs Gorilla in the market, they get to still command top dollar. Y-DNA testing is not anywhere close to the level of testing that we find in the autosomal market, so don't expect a bunch of close matches like you do with Ancestry. Some may have 5, some will not find a close ancestor in the past 2,000 years, others may find 30 close matches. This will improve greatly with time, especially with the volumes picking up. And also keep in mind this is only testing the father's father's father's and on back, so it is very narrow and specific, unlike autosomal that is a great big V, and thus a lot more matches. But Y-DNA does not dilute like autosomal over time as autosomal divides and recombines, and gets quite sketchy for matches by 1700 (if it even reaches that on some lines). It is passed down fully intact for 10's of thousands and even much further back. Except random mutations that occur every ~80 years, and are then passed down to all that man's sons. With anything below the Y-700 Big-Y test, it won't be of a whole lot of use, so if you go this route, plan on that test. However, you can order a lower level test, like the Y-67, and upgrade at a later date, but it will cost less in the end to do it all up front. As time goes on, and new people test you will discover more matches, but you may be waiting for seven years to get one. Another approach is to work your genealogy tree, find someone that descends from your 6th GGF, and work on getting them tested. Y will definitely show a match, where Autosomal often will not. This can confirm your lineage, or even help you understand why you cannot find anything, and interesting things like your matches, or should be matches do not carry your surname, and digging deeper you find 5GGF died in the Rev War, his wife remarried, and all the kids of the first man took on the surname of the second husband. I've knocked them down by one star because of multiple people I worked with in the past year had some difficulties cause by hiccups, usually transfers from the lab computer system to the system users interface with. But to their credit, all the situations were eventually resolved, some requiring weekly calls over an extensive period of time. One call should get the problem resolved, but when there is a problem it usually takes more than that, and only one time so far did it take 20 calls, and yes, it was their fault, and not a testing problem or restart. This may be due to their growing pains, hopefully they can get these things resolved. It would be nice if they were proactive and discovered the problems before hand, and notified the user they were having some difficulties. And really it should not have taken more than a week for any of these to be resolved, instead of months and months (but in only one case). However, their Family Finder test database is definitely one of the smallest ones out there, if you are not familiar, this is the low cost Autosomal DNA version of the test that places like Ancestry, 23andMe, MyHeritage, etc. do. In fact if you look hard enough, one can find these tests for under 10 dollars, except Ancestry, which you can atypically find for 38 dollars. Ancestry.com would be the #1 site by far, to test Autosomal DNA. Why? They have +25 million people tested, and you will find the most matches with Ancestry, where FTDNA only has about 1.6 million testers, so most folks will get 14x the matches. 23andMe has ~14 million testers. MyHeritage has about 8.5 million testers.

I would not have solved a family mystery if it wasn't for FTDNA and the Big-Y test.