Update : I was a secret and when the adoption agency located my birth mother, she said that the birth father on my adoption papers was not my father and that she didn't know who he was (wouldn't even provide basic medical information). I really need advice on whether or not I should contact distant relatives. Ancestry matched me with a second cousin, a third cousin, a few fourth cousins. I am afraid that I may scare them away if I make contact and will never find out the identity of my birth parents.

You look up your grandmother in census records (and her parents) and find where she actually lived. Generally, any tribes with ENROLLMENT will be linked to Oklahoma, and perhaps Arizona or other states.

I was provided with my grandmothers roll number, how do I obtain the information related to it; such as the tribe?

No way we can actually say. For the overall ancestral testing they use Autosomal. Autosomal is far more complicated than Y & Mitochondrial and not as exact. The reason why they don't use Y & Mitochondrial is you get each from only one person in each generation you go back. Example: When you get back to your 16 great great grandparents, 14 of them will not be included in Y or Mitochondrial.

There are no Haplogroups with Autosomal. They only thing companies can do is match you with population groups in their database. They don't all have the same database. One might not have or be deficient in certain population samples another has and vice versa. So the accuracy, no doubt, has a lot to do with what population samples they have and what your particular Autosomal DNA is which we don't know any of this in advance. In other words one company might be more accurate for you but not for another person.

You get Autosomal 50-50 from both parents but you can get 0 to 50% from any one grandparent. The reason why when your parents passed on the Autosomal they received from their parents to you it went through a process called "meiosis" where it was randomly jumbled and recombined. So while you got 50% from your father's side and 50% from your mother's, there can be a bias in what you inherited from grandmother and grandfather on both sides of the family. How you inherited any bias will not be how your siblings inherited it unless you have an identical twin. So let's say you and a full sibling is tested by the same company at the same time. Your results very like will not be the same. Example: You might have received more Autosomal from a Norwegian grandfather and your sibling might have received more from a Greek grandmother.

I don't think the companies actually lie but I believe this type of testing has been over hyped by celebrities who probably don't understand that much what they have received.

My own opinion any genealogy DNA test probably is a big waste of money unless you are involved in traditional genealogy work using documents/records. Companies frequently will find cousins in their database and advise you of them. If you are involved in genealogy and you make contact and they are interested you might be able to collaborate your information with them.

They also use the X with Autosomal. Since I assume you are a male, you got X from your mother. She got X from her father and her mother. Whose X did you get, your grandfather's or your grandmother's? No definite pattern.

As far as specific countries, a lot of countries in Europe didn't exist 150 to 200 years ago. I don't think they had border guards at every mountain pass and country lane asking for your passport. So trying to define someone's ancestry by a specific country going back in time really isn't all that simple.

No one can be located without knowing his name. Even a Private Detective would have to have a name to start the search.

Source(s):

Genealogical researcher 40+ years

www.familysearch.org has 446,113 results for the surname: Benjamin. One of them might be related to someone on your list.

"Benjamin" is like "Johnson" only they dropped the "son". It came about because there were two people named Ralph or Michael or John in the same village, so people called one "Ralph, son of Benjamin" and the other "Ralph the baker". As time went on they shortened those to "Ralph Benjamin" and "Ralph Baker". That's how surnames came about.

The thing is, it came about like that in HUNDREDS of villages. So there are lots of families with the last name Benjamin. (And thousands with the last names Baker, Cook, Carpenter, Miller . . .)

Please try again. Ask a second question. If you pick someone who has been dead for at least 20 years, because we don't do living people here, and tell us as many of these facts as you can, we may be able to find his/her parents for you.

Birth date and place (town, county, state)
Marriage date and place (town, county, state)
Death date and place (town, county, state)
Spouse's name (maiden name for women)