News from the FTDNA conference and the start of the FTDNA sale

The annual Family Tree DNA International Conference on Genetic Genealogy took place over the weekend in Houston, Texas. Jennifer Zinck has provided two very detailed write-ups from the conference which are well worth reading in their entirety and will give an idea of what we might expect from FTDNA in the coming months:

• 12th International Conference on Genetic Genealogy – Saturday
• 12th International Conference on Genetic Genealogy – Sunday

You can see some pictures and tweets from the conference by searching on Twitter using the hashtags #FTDNA2016 and #FTDNAconf2016.

If there are further reports from the conference I will post the links here.

Ancient Origins report
A new Ancient Origins report was announced at the conference and this feature is now live. Log into your Family Finder account to get your results. Here is my report.

There is currently little information provided about the populations used to inform these reports but there is a brief FAQ section in the FTDNA Learning Center. This is probably not a report to be taken too seriously but is a little bit of fun.

FTDNA sale
At the end of the conference FTDNA announced the start of their sale. The Family Finder test is on offer for just $59 (£47), its lowest ever price. There are reductions on all the other tests as well as on some upgrades. Click here to see a full list of all the tests available and all the other sale prices.

The BigY test is included in the sale and is on offer for $525 but is only available to existing customers who have already ordered a Y-STR test.

There are also lots of coupons being offered to existing customers which can provide additional reductions on top of the sale prices. The deals include offers for up to $100 off the Big Y test, $60 off the 111-marker Y-DNA test, $40 off the 67-marker Y-DNA test, $40 off the full mitochondrial sequence test, as well as smaller reductions on other tests and upgrades.

If you're looking for an extra discount look out for offers in the various genetic genealogy mailing lists and Facebook groups. Many groups, including some of the haplogroup projects, are maintaining spreadsheets to collate all the spare coupons so if you want to order a test check first to see what is available. The coupons will be issued every week on a Monday until the end of the year.