Living DNA – is it worth it?

Living DNA has been around for a decade now. They are based in the UK and heavily market on having better ethnicity breakdowns for the UK and Ireland. At a now defunct trade fair called Back to Our Past in 2017, they had a stand and were accepting uploads of tests from other sites, so I signed up.

They did have a 5 year partnership with Findmypast but it ended a few years ago, which means FMP is the only big commercial genealogy company without a DNA arm.

Current estimates suggest that the database of matches is just 300,000 people but this information is 5 years old, so it’s surely more than that now.

One of Living DNA’s big claims is that they have the best ethnicity breakdown for Britain & Ireland. As part of my review for this blog, I upgraded my test at a cost of €30 to see what it showed me. I’m not very impressed. It seems like them saying Ireland is just lip service, as there’s no breakdown at all for the 71% from here, apart from 2.3% Northern Ireland & Southwest Scotland. It does seem to have picked up my Pembrokeshire line, and we can ascribe my Liverpool/Cheshire/Shropshire bit to maybe central England? I’d be interested to know if someone with mostly UK ancestry fairs better.

When it comes to matches, the layout is a little confusing. The main homescreen shows that I have 911 matches at present. The default view is “degrees” so my highest match is a 4th degree connection. The person in question is a known quantity, and they are indeed a 1st cousin once removed.

In that person’s profile, I can communicate with them, see a list of shared matches and a chromosome browser breakdown. You can add people to a “matchbox” and assign a colour: useful for clustering. Once people are added to a group, you can overlay the shared segments on the chromosome browser. However, you do have to add people individually, and there seems to be a quirk where you can’t add them from the main list of matches.

In terms of new finds, when I first uploaded in 2017, I found a pair of siblings, second cousins once removed, who I knew about but didn’t know where they were. They remain my only discoveries to date, but this pair have never tested anywhere else, so I would not have found them without LivingDNA. Interestingly, I share far more with one of that sibling pair than the other. See here on chromosome 9.

The big glaring omission is the lack of a family tree builder. You have to communicate with each match to find where they have a tree, if any, if they reply. That said, because the database is small, I do have some matches already identified because they are also on a bigger site.

So my overall review is that LivingDNA may well be worth if you are trying to solve a family mystery, but just do the autosomal upload and don’t bother with the ethnicity upgrade. If you’re interested in enhancing your genealogical research, I’d put them to the bottom of the list. Here’s my video on how to upload your results.