FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions

This depends on your goals.

Family Tree DNA’s Paternal Ancestry test
$119 USA
If you simply want to get over a brick wall in the 1800s, or take the first step to what will hopefully become the Big Y 700, then we’ll recommend FTDNA’s 111-marker test.

FTDNA’s Family Ancestry test
$79 USD
This is a great test for females who are looking for matches in the last 5 generations.

FTDNA’s Family Ancestry + myDNA Wellness
$119 USD
Looking to know more about your female ancestry? This is the one.

Maternal Ancestry
$159USD
If you’re a male who wants to know all the information that 700 STRs and 200,000 SNPs can give you, there’s nothing else on the market like the Big Y-700.

Big Y 700
$449 USD
This is the best test for those family members who want to find matches back to the Middle Ages and even before that.

NOTE: Family Tree DNA has many sales throughout the year. Danny and I will keep you informed.

Depending on how much you participate, you’ll find out which of our 14+ lineages you fit with and be able to connect to people with documents you might not have seen. In Steve St. Clair’s case, he was brick walled in the early 1800s in Virginia. He and Stan St. Clair took the test and proved a connection. Stan’s paper trail was complete back to the mid 1600s pointing to an immigrant from the Glasgow area. They’re now part a lineage of about 20 people and have learned:

• Who the ancestors of Alexander Sinkler the 1698 immigrant from Glasgow.
• Where their medieval ancestors were living 1200 years ago.
• That our ancestors carried the St Clair / Sinclair / Sinkler name back as early as c. 1415 AD.

We’re currently managing the DNA results for over 679 people. Not all of these relate to our lineages. Some are simply testing theories of connectedness. If you have the last name Sinclair, St. Clair, Sinkler, Sinceler, or other variant spellings, or if you suspect a non-paternity event, such as an adoption, then you’ll likely end up finding out you connect to one of our existing lineages and be able to narrow your search for documents to that geography.

Steve St. Clair and Danny Redmond will help you figure it out. We’ve also got a great group of documents researchers in the clan who are extremely willing to help out. DNA plus documents gives you rock solid evidence of old connections.

The Saint-Clair DNA study makes no money. In fact, we regularly go in the hole helping to pay for the tests of those who can’t afford them. Family Tree DNA is a for-profit company, and their testing costs are very reasonable, especially when you realize how much you’ll learn.

We’re primarily a male study because we like to pair old records with DNA results. Old records were overwhelmingly slanted to the men in society. The combination of male DNA with records of men in land transfers, benefaction to abbeys and priories, marriage and death records makes this a powerful combination.

That said, we also help women choose the right tests with Family Tree DNA that might connect them into the Saint-Clair family.

Steve is doing very interesting research in medieval on females in the family.

The test results start to come in about a month or two after the original test kit gets back to Family Tree DNA. After that, depending on the test you took, we sometimes recommend further testing which will clarify where you connect. Those further tests vary from about a month to 3 months.

Many years after the fictional book and movie DaVinci Code came out, we still get a lot of calls about this. Our focus is on our family surname variants and how to solve genealogy questions and point our members towards the next phase of their documents research using deep DNA testing.

The short answer is “no.”

We can help with this and have done so multiple times. Get in touch at the Contact link above and let’s start discussing next steps.

We originally tested with FTDNA because they had the largest database, and this is all about the size of the database. FTDNA continues to be the world leader.

If you tested with 23andMe©, AncestryDNA™, or MyHeritage™ you can transfer to FTDNA for free. Depending on which test you took, there may be a small fee required from Family Tree DNA.

Click the link below and from there, click on “Autosomal Transfers.”

Click HERE >>