Ancestry DNA

I bought one for my brother, mom and step father. They liked it as a gift.
I haven't done one but would be interested to compare it to my brothers.

I actually want to do the 23 and me which is more detailed I gather and goes into genetic predispositions (like for diseases and traits)...for some people tho this info is unwanted tho so I don't think it is a good gift.

The Ancestry DNA is pretty basic info and seems fun!

Next time I see them on sale I might do it...super interested to compare to my brother's results

I've done Ancestry dna and 23andMe. Differences in percentages because each uses different algorithms and database, but both give useful results. Both my sisters, a nephew, and an aunt have also been tested by one or the other, and it is very interesting comparing the information for each.
Ancestry is more useful if you have a tree there, and if your identified dna relatives also have trees. I like 23andMe better because it gives more/better detail, and allows you to compare with dna relatives chromosome by chromosome.

When you have your Ancestry and/or 23andme results, you can export the data and upload to GEDmatch:

https://www.gedmatch.com

It provides a lot of information and tools for analyzing your results. As others have said, 23andme provides information about genes for diseases. My father's father was from Sicily, but I ended up only have a small amount of southern European ancestry - 63% is from eastern and northern Europe and Russia/the Caucasus (which explains my fine hair texture and blue eyes, I suspect). It may be my great grandmother was even more of a tart than I know - she ran away from my great grandfather with her lover, and supposedly my grandfather and his brother were her only "legitimate" offspring. Maybe she had an affair with some eastern European emigrant to Sicily and my grandfather wasn't "legitimate" after all. Sicilians have Norman/Viking, Italian, Moorish, and Arab blood so it might be the genetics are too mixed up to show as Mediterranean.

A first cousin I haven't heard from since the 1970s contacted me because the Ancestry DNA test correctly flagged us as first cousins - so you can indeed have some nice surprises when you take the test. I did have a person message me because Ancestry says we're fourth cousins, but neither of us can find any connection between our family trees.

I did it a few years ago and found it fascinating, and a little surprising in a few instances (I essentially have identified myself as Irish my entire life because of my last name and found that I was mostly English, oops, lol)

Recently I uploaded my DNA data to promethease.com, which was offering a free medical analysis of my health by (anonymously comparing my DNA results to those of thousands of medical patients). I found it to be scarily accurate in identifying medical things that I have already experienced and it provides probabilities for developing medical problems in the future.

I had my DNA analysis done through 23andme. While I've been a long-time user of Ancestry for my family tree, after reading about the differences among the various services I felt that 23andme would provide me with more information.

My results confirmed many things I knew about my ancestry but there were some surprises. The % results for one ethnicity was higher than expected (I always laughingly told my family members that I got all the Irish genes based on my various features. It turns out that I was correct.) and the percentage was significantly less for another. I was surprised to learn that I have small amounts of Eastern European, Scandinavian, and Southern European ancestry so I'm a little bit more ethnically diverse that I thought. Some recent digging into records for my family tree has led me to a branch that goes way back, which includes Danish surnames. Thus, supporting my surprising Scandinavian results.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to convince my mother or siblings to join me. However, my oldest daughter sent hers off just before Christmas so I'm looking forward to seeing what her results reveal.

I also obtained medical data by running my 23andme raw data through the Prometheus program https://promethease.com/

The Prometheus report (It was free in December. I think it costs $10 regularly.) is massive, and it accurately predicted my various physical traits. It also provided some very interesting and helpful results related to medical issues. For example, I found out that I am a carrier of the gene for Cystic Fibrosis so I let my daughters know and my siblings so they could tell my nieces that this gene is in our family. I would caution, however, that if you are someone who is a real worrier about your health, some results might freak you out. However, knowledge is power and learning about the genetic mutations I have (both positive and negative) is quite helpful.

I got a kit for Christmas too and haven’t yet sent it back either.

The ethnicity reports from all of these companies are basically educated guesses - they compare your DNA to various sample populations and pick the most likely match, which works well in some cases and poorly in others, depending on how relevant to you the sample population is. It doesn't help that global populations have moved and interbred over millennia - for example, some native Germans test as part Native American, despite having no ancestors who have even been on the American continent, because the Huns have some genes shared with Native Americans thousands of years ago.

One good analogy: imagine you are sorting beans into different buckets. You have buckets for white beans, kidney beans, and green peas. Someone hands you a Lima bean and tells you to put it into one of the buckets. Does it go with the green peas because it's green, or the kidney beans because it's the same shape, or the white beans because it's larger? You have to pick one, and only one bucket. The truth is that whichever bucket you pick will be wrong, because a Lima bean is not any of those things... but there is no bucket for Lima beans.

On the other hand, the cousin matches can be very useful.

I'm one of those people who have a story that could be used on a commercial - I found out while sorting through my mother's matches that she did not match any of her close cousins on her father's side. On a hunch I searched for names associated with her stepfather's family, and found out that the man she had grown up believing was her stepfather, who married her mother when my mother was just a baby, was actually her biological father. Since her mother and both men were dead, this created a mystery: did her parents even know who her father was? After a lot of searching through old papers and letters I found a WWII era letter from her mother to her biological father, written while he was serving as a soldier, which said, "I know that you love our daughter." So, apparently they did know, but never told her.

Because my mother always thought of her stepfather as her "real father" she was delighted to learn the truth, and only regretted that they had never spoken about it while he was alive. But I have seen many cases on the Ancestry forum where families were shaken to their roots by revelations like this - siblings testing and learning they are only half siblings, children discovering that one of their parents is not a biological parent. Even one interesting case in which a woman found out that her fraternal twin was actually an identical twin - because the two women were very different heights, they had always believed they were fraternal twins, but the likely cause is that one was severely ill as a baby. You have to be ready for skeletons to pop out of your closet, because you just never know!