Some help with genealogy please?

[Archangel]

There are limitation to the DNA test that make the process questionable.

You can really only relate to living people so you still have to go back to whatever reliability you put on the "historical" data.

The margin for error is pretty high.

The principal clues go all the way back to the dawn of time and don't tell you too much about the recent past.

Have a look at the Wikipedia article before you spend too much. Google some other critiques as well and then make your decision from an informed perspective.

[gilmore]

I was very surprised at some false statements in the Wikipedia article, such as "There is no usefulness in Maternal DNA because the mother displaces the father's maternal DNA ( from his mother). Maternal DNA continue only from mother to daughter." Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to both sons and daughters. I don't know what the author means by "displaces father's DNA." That is just strange.

As to Archangel's post, it contains statements that are way, way off, such as "There are limitation to the DNA test that make the process questionable."
The process is not at all questionable. How the results are interpreted may be.

"The margin for error is pretty high." That is simply untrue. The tests are rather simple. If errors occur, I have never heard of them. Comparing results from two Y chromosome DNA tests can tell with a very high degree of propability how closely related two individuals are, how distant their most recent common ancestor was.

"The principal [sic] clues go all the way back to the dawn of time and don't tell you too much about the recent past" is totally untrue in Coemgen's case. It could very well be a first step in discovering who his biological grandfather was.

DNA testing may not tell an adoptee what his biological parents' address and phone numbers are, but are being used increasing by adoptees to find out bout their ancestry. As I said, it is casting your bread upon the water. It may identify close relatives, or it may not. Genetic genealogy is relatively new, about six years old. FTDNA keeps the samples for 25 years. You just never know what will show up.