Tommy Grimes

So you are thinking about ordering one of those DNA tests that you’ve seen advertised for the past few years. Either for yourself, to learn more about your own ethnicity, discover possible health conditions, find long lost family, etc, or as a gift for a family member or friend. Here are my recommendations to help you decide between either Ancestry DNA or 23 and Me.

I took my DNA tests because I wanted to find my late father’s biological family. My big sister, Carrie, was diagnosed with BRCA1 breast cancer in the beginning of 2016. Thankfully, she was able to beat cancer. In the process we learned a family secret. Her cancer was had a specific variant only found in Ashkenazi Jewish people. My father was an Evangelical minister and fell in love with Israel after he spent a year studying there in college. I wish I could have shared this knowledge with him, but before he passed this past April from COVID-19 he was suffering from Early Onset Dementia. He was never able to understand that at least one of his parents was in fact Jewish.

So that’s my story! I have a YouTube Channel you can check out if you are interested in learning more or following my journey to find my father’s biological family. I also make lost of Vlogs about DNA testing, so look for those too!

Prices:

Ancestry DNA offers their base ethnicity test for $99. You can add-on a feature to explore your traits for an additional $20. They also offer an Ancestry Health kit which gives you a run down of possible health conditions you may have (like BRCA1). The health kits is $179. 23 and Me offers their base ethnicity kit for $99 and it includes a traits feature! Their health kit is also available for $199.

Keep in mind that these kits are constantly going on sale. I also made a vlog about when to look for said deals. At the time of this writing you can purchase the base 23 and Me kit for $79 or their health kit $99. Ancestry is selling their base kit for $59 and their health kit $119. So if you are looking for the cheapest option for learning your ethnicity in addition to health issues, 23 and Me wins on price currently. If you are looking just for the base option, then Ancestry is the way to go. I expect there to be even deeper sales on Black Friday.

Processing Times:

Looking over at thednageek.com which has a running estimate of how long it takes for each test to come back, you can see that 23 and Me has an estimated 14 day turn around time. So within about 2 weeks you should get your results. Ancestry is currently looking at an estimated 31 days for processing your results. So if you are not a very patient person, maybe hedge your bets on 23 and Me. I do want to reiterate that these are estimates! I would expect times to be longer heading into and right after the holiday season.

Matches:

If your goal is to find family members then you want to consider the size of each companies user database. 23 and Me has over 12 million users. But Ancestry DNA has even more with about 18 mission people using their service. For the greatest pool of matches I would start with Ancestry and if you want to increase your chance of finding matches then you can always do 23 and me later.

Once you find your matches you will probably want to get in contact with them. For me, there was a clear winner in the messaging features between the two companies. Ancestry actually has an inbox which sorts conversations with other users into threads. 23 and Me is not as user friendly in this regard. They mix your message alerts in with all of the other notifications they send you for completely unrelated things. 23 and Me also doesn’t sort your responses in a user friendly way. It’s just a chronological list of all your responses.

When you have a match, 23 and Me shows you in a percentage how much DNA you share with the other user. Ancestry shows you shared centimorgans. Centimorgans are a unit of genetic measurement. Each person has roughly 6,800 centimorgans. Based on the amount you share with another user you get an estimated possible relationship. My mother also took an Ancestry DNA test. We share 3,436 Cm. That leads Ancestry to predict a parent/child relationship. 23 and Me also shows centimorgans but only after you have sent an invitation to connect that has been accepted by the other user.

Other Services:

The health features are probably the most obvious extra service you can get with both 23 and Me and Ancestry DNA. You don’t have to get it right away though. If you originally purchase the base ethnicity kits for either company you can later pay a fee to upgrade and get your health results. If I had to pick between the two I would go with 23 and Me for health results. It’s close though. 23 and Me has had their health service up and running for a little bit longer. I like the way they present the information and I actually think they might test for more things. I should note that both 23 and Me and Ancestry DNA found that I also have the BRCA1 mutation that is inherited.

Ancestry also offers a family tree subscription service. It’s how the company started. You can build out your family tree and piggy back off of research other users have done. They have tons of historical records to search through to aid you on your journey. The U.S. Discovery membership is $25 a month or $99 for 6 months. They have additional levels like World Explorer and All Access.

23 and Me has a new subscription service called 23andMe+. It gives you exclusive Heart Health Reports, Drug metabolism Reports, Migraine Reports, Advanced DNA Relatives filters, and additional reports to be released in the future. This service costs $29 a year.

Ethnicity Results:

Be prepared for your results to change over time. I originally tested in 2018 and my results look a little different today. I’ll point you to my most recent vlog for an in depth look at what changed for me. I am not a geneticist, so I am not qualified to comment on which of these two are more accurate. I do slightly favor the results I received from Ancestry though. I like their map a little better too. It just feels more interactive. They also gave some cool information on Pennsylvania settlers that I found interesting (my Mom’s side is Pennsylvania Dutch which is German).

Final Thoughts:

Different people will purchases these tests for a variety of reasons. If you want to do serious family tree research then definitely go with Ancestry DNA. If you want to have fun and use the more user-friendly option, I’d go with 23 and Me. There are other companies out there as well though. You can always look into My Heritage DNA or Family Tree DNA.

If you found this review helpful I’d appreciate it if you head over to YouTube and subscribe or follow me here on Tumblr. I’ll be sharing more about my journey to find my father’s biological family.

My father, Reverend James Grimes, has passed away. My father is not alive. My father is dead.

I need to repeat those words to myself sometimes because it still seems so unreal. My father passed away on April 21st, 2020. He was living in Gracedale Nursing Home in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. For over 10 years he suffered from early onset dementia. His decline was slow and steady, eventually leading to a sort-of plateau. For the last 5 years I haven’t been able to see so much as a glimmer of the man I knew as my father. In my mind he was gone. But he wasn’t. I could still see him. He was there physically. All the things people say about Dementia and Alzheimer’s are true. It’s a fate I would not wish on everyone. That my father got it in his 50’s seems cruel. 

I always expected to receive the call that my father had passed suddenly. It was a cloud that has followed me over these past 5 years since he plateaued. As I traveled, moved and deployed with the military, I always felt on edge. I knew at any moment that I could get the news and hurry home. I expected it, yes. But, I can’t say that I was prepared, certainly not for the circumstances under which he finally left us. 

I thought his nursing home was a relatively secure place to be at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. They had gone under lockdown in March. My conversations with my mother never gave me any reason to think he was in any danger. I knew that if he were to contract the illness it was likely be a death sentence for him with his compromised immune system. Then I got the call from my mother. There had been an outbreak at Gracedale and my father tested positive for COVID-19. Within a week of up and down reports, he passed in the morning hours. He was one of the almost 70 deaths in the nursing home where he resided.

With deaths now approach a quarter of a million, I know my family is not alone in our experience. Upon his passing there was no way for me to be physically close to my sisters and mother. Having recently moved to the West Coast, I wanted so badly to hop on a plane and head home. But there was nothing to be done. Nothing I could do. I put my focus instead on a memorial video for my father and spoke with my sisters about his passing and legacy. In retrospect, it was by far the hardest video I’ve ever had to create. 

Still, It was cathartic. My father was an Evangelical minister. At the time of his dementia diagnosis I was finishing college. After leaving home and moving to Philadelphia I finally felt like I had the space to admit to myself that I no longer could call myself a Christian. What I thought was the end to a steady stream of doubt and investigation was really only the beginning of my deconstruction. It’s a journey I still find myself on all these years later. Every day I learn something new, have a preconception shattered or recognize ways that the culture that brought me up has affected the world and myself. I once feared what the conversations I would have with my father would be like after he learned I had decided to take my life down such a starkly different road. I wonder now if it is worse that we never got to have those conversations. Perhaps I needed that closure.

I didn’t often comment publicly on my beliefs (or lack thereof). I thought about it often though. I wrote screenplays. I talked with friends and family that had shared experiences with leaving the church. I wanted to dive deeper. A few years ago I decided it was time to start filming some sort of documentary about my family. It was time to put that film degree and combat camera experience to work.

On January 1st, 2016, my oldest sister, Carrie, called me at work. She had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Eventually, we learned that she had the BRCA1 mutation which is genetic. Her specific variant is one only found in Ashkenazi Jewish people. Thankfully, my sister is a complete bad ass. She kicked cancer’s ass while be a full-time mom, nursing student, Air Force Reservists and while working a full time job (seriously, I don’t know how she does it). With the news of our family having Jewish ancestry the spark was lit to begin work the documentary.

My father was adopted. We always knew that. It made it all the more difficult to know whether his dementia was something that is common in his family. We always speculated about his ethnicity. I always maintained hope that we would find out we were Jewish. Like many Evangelical families, we had a big crush on the country of Israel. But even more so than most because our father had studied in Israel for a year in college. He brought back with him a love for Jewish culture that he impressed upon us with his stories. Myself, I was always into movies. Nearly all of my idols as a child were Jewish.

So, I set forth to find my father’s biological family. I took 3 DNA tests including Ancestry DNA, 23 and Me and Family Tree DNA. Together they revealed that I had between 34-40% Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. For me that was a stunning revelation made bittersweet by the reality that my father would never get to share in the knowledge.

Over the last 3 years I have made progress on my search. I realize now that this story is as much about my search for my father’s family as it is about my understanding of myself. It’s about my family, my mother, my sisters and our childhood growing up in the Evangelical Christian subculture. It is about how we all went our own ways as adults to reconcile what faith means to each of us. I am finally gathering the courage to speak about why I left Christianity. I am now trying to find my voice and share my experience.

What I’ve learned after seeing my father’s illness and my sister’s close call is that I need to make the most of the time I have. Thankfully, over these past few months I have finally been able to take the time this venture requires. I hope to be posting more videos to my YouTube channel and also write more about my journey.

I am learning as I go. I know it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be out there. It’s the best I can do. My hope is that this story may find others dealing with loss or deconstruction. And If it does then I think I will feel like I have accomplished my goal.