FGS Sale

To Summarize:

FTDNA has a sale of their Full Mitochondria Sequence going on through October 31 -

The details:

  •    $179 (was $410) for those who have already tested up to HVR2 (the order
          item is HVR2 to MEGA)
  •    $199 (was $420) for those who have already tested HVR1 (the order item
          is HVR1 to MEGA)
  •    $229 (was $439) for first time mtDNA test takers (the order item is
          mtFullSequence)

At this point I should remind you that Carol and I are volunteers in this project and neither she nor I have any financial interest in your DNA testing.

To help you decide whether you care about this sale or not, consider the following from Roberta Estes:

There are three reasons to take the full sequence test.

1. It is the only way you can get your full extended haplogroup.    While this might might not be of interest today, your full haplogroup is the only way you ever have of knowing where your ancient ancestor were, and when.    Your full haplogroup tells you far more than your mini-haplogroup.    The product I provide for my clients is the Personalized DNA Report, sold by Family Tree DNA.    For people who are interested in their deep ancestry, it is now possible often to connect the dots between deep ancestry and were your ancestor were first found in Europe.    We've learned a great deal over the past couple of years, in particular, and much of it is due to the full extended haplogroups/haplotypes.    For example, my haplogroup J takes me back to before the last ice age.    J1 takes me back to around the ice age and J1c takes me back only a few thousand years and the clusters of where J1c is found is critically important to discovering who those people were and where they came from.    J1c is only available through the full sequence because the defining mutations for J1c are not in HVR1 and 2.    I can tell far more from knowing that I'm J1c than I can from knowing only that I'm J.

2. It is the only way you will ever know if you really match another person or not.    Maybe this doesn't matter to you, but if you do match someone else on the HVR1 and HVR2 levels, but not at the FGS level, then you're not a real match.    Of course, a mutation can happen any time, but I see less of them in mtdna than I do in Y line DNA.

3. The more full sequence DNA that is available in the haplogroup, regional and geographic projects, the more we can learn, as a group and of course individually about migration of people and the populating of the earth, which of course is genealogy before last names, or as close as we can get.