Although a few hundred genetic variants are sufficient to infer close familial relationships, the development of the latest methodologies makes it possible to infer more distant relationships, such as second to fourth cousins. These relatives often share extensive segments of DNA that are identical. Since the genetic recombination that occurs in each individual breaks down these shared segments, two relatives will vary, not only in the number of shared fragments, but also in their size, information that is used in DNA tests to find and establish familial relationships.
Discover the DNA test to find relatives
At tellmeGen, thanks to the DNA Connect service, we give you the possibility to find genetic relatives within our database, consisting of thousands of individuals from all over the world, and allow you to contact them. To do this, once we receive the genotyped sample, we identify the identical segments among all possible pairs of people in our database (these segments are known as IBD, Identity by descent), we estimate the length, in cM, of these segments and compare the information, through complex algorithms, between each pair of users in our database.
With this methodology we can identify close relationships, up to a second cousin, with almost 100% reliability. However, the more distant a pair of cousins is, the less identical DNA they share and this makes the fragments more difficult to detect by our system, making these relationships less likely to be identified.
Discover your DNA family history
With tellmeGen’s genetic test you could receive surprising results about your family tree. Do you really know how many cousins you have?
You probably know how many siblings or first cousins you have, but how many second cousins, third cousins, fourth cousins or even more distant cousins?
Imagine that you belong to a family model with 2-3 children. In this hypothetical case, you could have more than 30 second cousins, more than 200 third cousins and almost 1000 fourth cousins. This is an estimate since there are couples who have more than 5 children and others none, but what is clear is that we have more cousins than we imagine.
Surprised? At tellmeGen we can help you detect these relatives with high reliability. We only need two things: that they are part of the tellmeGen family and that they have accepted the search for relatives.
Are you up for discovering your genetic family?
