When researching your family tree, using Ancestry DNA can help you find other closely related users and their family trees.

Here’s how you can use Ancestry DNA for researching your family history:

1. Get the Ancestry.com DNA tests done. It costs a few hundred dollars, and took a few weeks for me to get my results
2. Once they send you the results, they also give you a huge list of probably-related folks based on your DNA. Most of those folks have uploaded their family trees too, with which you can compare.
3. Look at the family trees of those probably-related users. See if there are any of their ancestors whose names match any of yours.
4. Once you’ve found some common ancestors, see if they have info you don’t, like sources, stories, or other individuals in their tree that are missing from yours.

For example, here’s the list of folks ancestr.com said I was probably related to.

Although it couldn’t automatically determine how I was related them, you can see it’s ordered them by most probably relationship. And then I could see those folks’ family trees, and look for any names I recognize in my tree. So far I’ve found a few cousins once removed this way.