Anyone recently ordered and mailed back DNA test kits?

9 comments

1. I sent a MyHeritage kit and an AncestryDNA kit via EMS this year.
   I forgot how much I paid for AncestryDNA, but probably around 3,000 – 4,000 yen, and it arrived in Ireland in about a week.

2. If you tell them what is really in it they won’t accept it.

3. You have to ship via EMS. 4k to ship a tiny cotton swab.

4. For Ancestry, are you sure you need to ship to the US? We were instructed to mail it to Ireland (their international mailing address).

   For Ancestry:

   1)activate test online.

   2) select “ready to ship”. You will then be provided with a pre-paid DHL waybill label to print.

   3) on DHL’s Japanese website, arrange pickup using the waybill number.

   They came and picked up the package from our home.

5. Why is everyone so excited to send off their DNA to dubious companies who will just share it with the police, FBI, etc. in basically whatever country wants it.

   Then they can later use your DNA in trials / police work against you, and your relatives and decedents.

   I hope whatever company you are sending it to has an ironclad legal agreement with you to never use your DNA in cloning or you might have clones running around one day. Who knows what else they’ll be able to do with your DNA one day. And fuck if they ever go out of business or are bought out by another company that decides to no longer abide by the contract you had with a now extinct company.

   Also, let’s hope no governments wants to use DNA to exclude you or your decedents from reproduction because you are 5% Jewish or used by a dating site to screen out matches looking up if your family has a history of cancer or Korean ancestry, or any number really unpleasant things we haven’t even thought of yet.

6. Why does it have to be a US based company? There are plenty of Japan based companies as well.

7. If you do a DNA test with Ancestry, you can download your results, pay a small fee and upload them to My Heritage and get results there too. In my case they were different from Ancestry and I also got different DNA matches.

8. Don’t do it. You need to ship it to someone stateside who will then put it in a different box that will be labeled with an American address. If they receive it from Japan, they’ll tell you they can’t do it.

9. I did Ancestry earlier this year (second time as there was a problem with the first test I sent late last year).

   When you order directly from Ancestry online with your international address, they send you a kit with a prepaid international return box to Ireland because the US won’t accept it.

   Both times I dropped it off at the counter at the post office. Even though Ancestry said I could just drop it in a post box, I didn’t expect the postal workers to know what to do with an international prepaid box so I wanted to be sure it got there.

   Sure enough, both times the clerk working the window didn’t think they could accept it and both times the manager they called over to help confirmed that it was ok. The first time they were hesitant to accept the contents but I told them it was a saliva sample for heritage research and they confirmed it was not prohibited. The second time was much easier.

   While there’s no space provided for writing a return address on the box, I wrote mine on the second box anyhow in case the final checks before it left the country were doubtful. The second one only took a few days to arrive in Ireland whereas the first one (that failed) which I hadn’t written my information took over three weeks.

   All in all, aside from the little interrogation the first time, it was as smooth a process as the Ancestry agent told me.