Anonymous wrote:what do you like better about 23andme? I did ancestry, and was sort of disappointed by how non-specific it was. My mother's ancestry was represented, for instance, under "New England settlers" - pretty broad categorization that I already knew.
The first things Ancestry gives is an "Ethnicity Estimate" (with percentages by region of the world). The "Migrations" information is more like a bonus, in my mind. You had to have gotten information about the likely regions your ancestors came from, right?
I don't have experience with 23andme, but I've managed the DNA samples that relatives did through Ancestry. I like that we can link the sample to the basic family tree information we do have, including names and places. Then when we find cousin matches, I can find potential areas of overlap. (Maybe that person also had a "Thompson" relative from the same county born within the same 20 years as my ancestor, so maybe that's the place to look for the connection.) I also like being able to subscribe, even just a month at a time, to the regular Ancestry service so that I can try to find records for our ancestors. Sometimes on a birth or death record, for example, there is valuable information like the mother's maiden name. That said, I don't have any experience tracing African-American lines. If you haven't already, you might want to check out "Finding Your Roots" (on PBS and Amazon Prime) to see the experts in action.