My Living DNA Results Are In - Mon, 6 Aug 2018

Today, I received an email from Living DNA that my test results are now available.

After watching several of the RootsTech livestreamed presentations by David Nicholson and Hannah Morden of Living DNA in February, their promise of their upcoming Family Networks capability to reconstruct family trees intrigued me. I hadn’t tested with them prior because I wanted them first to provide my matches to other DNA testers. Now they’ve said it’s coming.

I waited for the first Living DNA test kit sale. On April 20, they had a National DNA Day Sale and I purchased a kit online at $135.20 CAD, regularly $199 CAD, so it was 32% off. There was an additional $14.95 CAD delivery charge.

I had a bit of a rocky time with the test kit. They informed me it was shipped on April 23, with expected delivery time to Canada of 14 to 20 working days. It still had not arrived by June 4, so I contacted them and they said they would send out another kit with upgraded shipping. The new kit was shipped on June 19 and I got it on June 22. I did my test and sent it back the next day. Wouldn’t you know it, but the original kit I ordered arrived not too long after, on June 29, which worked out to 49 working days.

The test I sent back on June 23 through regular post arrived at their lab on July 6. They estimated the completion of the analysis to be Oct 1, but here it is Aug 6, so it took much less than their estimated time. I have submitted these dates to Leah Larkin’s DNA Test Processing Times survey.

When I login to Living DNA’s site to check my results, I get this menu:

The Family Networks will be their new person-matching system, and as you can see it is not available yet.

I previously had done tests with the 4 major DNA testing companies:  Family Tree DNA, Ancestry DNA, 23andMe, and MyHeritage DNA. I did a comparison of the results back in March in my post: A Tale of Four DNA Tests. I’ll now compare my Living DNA experience with the other 4 tests.

Processing Times

As explained above, it took 67 days for the first Living DNA kit to arrive after I ordered it. It took 3 days for the upgraded shipping kit to arrive. The other four companies took from 6 to 18 days for the kit to arrive after ordering.

It took only 13 days for my tested kit to arrive back at Living DNA’s lab after I mailed it. That was quicker than the 15 to 25 days it took to mail back to the other companies.

The test took 31 days for Living DNA to finish processing and make my results available to me. The other companies took between 12 and 32 days.

Ethnicity Percentages

Now this was interesting. The other companies have me listed as between 84% and 99% Ashkenazi Jewish. But Living DNA does not have a Jewish category.

Living DNA gives me just this:

• Europe: 63%
• Near East: 35.9%
• Africa: 1.1%

Their complete breakdown to subregions is this:

The only sub-regions that correspond to where my ancestors are from include East Balkans (1.1%) which represents my Romania, and the part of Northeast Europe (3.4%) that includes my Ukraine but is not Poland.

So unfortunately for me, I don’t see that as being at all helpful, since less than 5% of their regional breakdown corresponds to where my ancestory were from. Living DNA really needs to include ethnic groups like the other companies do, especially when endogamy is involved. Ethnic group genetic ties are often stronger than location-based genetic ties.

I hear they do a wonderful job for people from Great Britain, getting right down to the county, so I was hoping they’d do a bit better than this for me.

Haplogroups

Living DNA gives you both your Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups with their basic test. Here’s my comparison of haplogroups with Family Tree DNA where I took both Y-DNA and mt-DNA tests and with 23andMe. Ancestry DNA and MyHeritage DNA do not supply haplogroup information.

Y-DNA haplogroup:

• Living DNA:  R1a –> R-M198 –> R-M417 –> R-Z645 –> R-Z93
• 23andMe:  R-M417
• FTDNA:  M198 –> M417 –> Z93 –> (7 levels ) –> R-BY24978

Living DNA does give my Y-DNA haplogroup two levels deeper than 23andMe does. But as would be expected, my BigY Family Tree DNA test gave the most detail with an additional 8 levels beyond R-Z93.

mt-DNA haplogroup:

• Living DNA:  Haplogroup K1a, Subclade: K1a1b1a
• FTDNA:  K1a1b1a.
• 23andMe: K1a1b1a

All 3 companies match on my mt-DNA haplogroup.

DNA Relatives

Living DNA’s matching to other testers is not active yet. When I go to the Family Networks page, I currently get this:

Last Fall, Living DNA was accepting DNA transfers to their One-Family project. On Oct 26, I transferred both my and my uncle’s raw data from Family Tree DNA. Back then they gave an expected completion date of Aug 6, 2018 which I was waiting patiently for and coincidentally happens to be today, the same day I got my actual test results. Living DNA sent me this in an email about the One-Family project today:

The status of this test is listed as “Awaiting Testing” and shows the following message:

Also, on July 19, Living DNA announced a partnership with Find My Past and said there would be a new DNA Matching portal that would be available for free and for a limited time. I wanted to see if this was anything different. I uploaded my 23andMe raw data via this portal. This upload shows up on my Living DNA account as a test with status: “Awaiting Testing” and shows exactly the same message (see above) as my One Family transfer. So both the acceptance of raw transfers last fall as well as the new Find My Past partnership seem to be going to the same place.

I’m looking forward to seeing what matches result out of all this and what autosomal and family tree tools Living DNA will provide. In February, Living DNA made a short You Tube preview about Family Networks. It looks interesting and will include a chromosome browser:

Raw Data Files

Living DNA gives you 3 raw data downloads:

I compared autosomal raw dna from two of my tests in a blog post last year:
Raw Data Comparison: FamilyTreeDNA vs MyHeritage DNA.  I plan to do a new comparison that will include Living DNA, Ancestry DNA and 23andMe files in a future blog post.