"These types of things happen from time to time in most families. Often the surprises are not so immediate as in this case, but sometimes they are. You just have to realize that anything is possible and DNA does not care about family secrets. "
This is very true!
I knew that I had a half bro/half sis out there (I had found them years ago) but just imagine the shock if I had just idly done 23sndme and two names had popped up as half siblings. (Or if I hadn’t known that my real sister who I grew up with is technically my half sister.) I’ve already done the “knock, knock, you don’t know me but I’m your older sister and now let’s unearth all the family secrets” in person. It’s quite a shock to everyone’s system
And in doing genealogy it is super easy to romanticize our ancestors as these hardworking, loving people of high moral values. Well, maybe Great Grandma and Great Grandpa stayed married for 70 years because he beat her and she had no way to support herself and her 12 kids. Or Great Uncle Joe was fleeing the old country since he killed a man. Or siblings fought about something stupid, declared the other was “dead to me” and had no contact from then on.
Be prepared for anything! Be prepared on the genealogy side to see how hard childbirth was in women. I have a great great grandmother who had 1 child, then 4 children in succession who were born and died in infancy, then 5 more. And that kind of story is extremely common. You’ll find young women who died in childbirth. It’s all fascinating and makes you realize how fortunate we are today.
I would also add that if you have contemplated learning about your Ancestry at some point, I strongly recommend spending the $99 each to get any close elderly relatives (ideally your parents, or grandparents) to take a spit test while they are still around to be tested. That can save you a huge amount of time in sorting out your family tree and understanding your cousin matches.
Also, getting any family tree information or photos while someone from the earlier generation is still around to explain events or answer questions is very helpful. In my SOs family, there were many old photos (one relative was a photographer) but they were not labelled. If we hadn’t gone through them proactively, then later we would have still have had the old photos, but no one living would have known who was in them.
"These types of things happen from time to time in most families. Often the surprises are not so immediate as in this case, but sometimes they are. You just have to realize that anything is possible and DNA does not care about family secrets. "
That’s one good reason why it’s easier/better to do genetics research on mice rather than humans. With mice you always know for sure exactly who the father is. With humans that question always hangs over your data, adding error and uncertainty.
Both of my parents are gone, so I can’t go there with them. I look at my inlaws and I am really sure they would push back on it. H would push back as well. (genetics?) I doubt my B would go for this too. I think they’d think this was really intrusive. Me? I think it’d be fun. But I am the odd one and they all know it.
I haven’t read through the full thread, so I may be repeating some comments. I am familiar with both 23andMe and Ancestry DNA. 23andMe’s location percentage outputs are generally more vague than Ancestry. For example, my largest percentage was 38% Broadly Northwestern European. Ancestry breaks down a greater degree to more specific countries or country groups. I’d expect Ancestry is taking educated guesses, while 23andMe is being more safe in their guesses. Nevertheless, it can be more interesting to see a more specific country breakdown.
In the past year or so, 23AndMe dramatically increased their prices and added (returned?) some general health reports about things like lactose intolerance, sleep style, being prone to diseases, etc. I guess the extra price is supposed to be for the health reports. You can get far more detailed health reports by uploading your raw DNA file to 3rd parties, such as promethease.com . This one works with both Ancestry and 23AndMe and produces a report that is hundreds of pages long with proneness to a huge number of diseases, medication reactions, or just random interesting facts (for example, likely to think cilantro tastes like soap). Regardless of which DNA analysis service you choose, I’d recommend running the raw report through promethease.com .
Another 3rd party site I’d recommend is gedmatch.com , which also works with both. This one offers a variety of tools including one that compares your DNA to existing populations and shows what percentage of existing populations is closest. It also shows DNA relatives based on shared DNA segments. I had two 3rd cousins contact me through this site after coming up as a relatively large DNA segment match. You can also find up to ~6th cousins through the databases at 23AndMe and Ancestry. I expect Ancestry’s database is the largest and are most likely to follow up if you contact them, but I haven’t tried to do so. It’s my understanding Ancestry has a way to link your DNA results to your family tree and find relatives that way. The tree database is quite powerful, I was able to trace my ancestry back all the way to Charlemagne, more than 1200 years ago.
As far as my satisfaction, both services take a long time to get the report back, 1-2 months if I remember correctly. This part was unpleasant. I also didn’t like the style of spit testing. The actual report was an interesting read. It was probably worth the ~$79 price at the time (they have sales or coupons from time to time), especially considering access to the raw data 3rd party sites mentioned above. As you can gather from my post, I’d recommend AncestryDNA over 23AndMe since it is half the price and offers some more desirable features.
One thing to note is that neither test sequences your entire genome. Both look at various little snippets of your DNA. They don’t look at the same snippets.
There are reams and reams of scientific studies showing associations between certain medical conditions and certain snippets, so many studies that some are undoubtedly spurious. The same medical conditions can be associated with a lot of different snippets of DNA. So for example, if a person has variant A of gene 1, they might be statistically 20% MORE likely to develop Alzheimers, and if they have variant Z of gene 2, they might be statistically 30% LESS likely to develop Alzheimers.
In most cases, no scientist has looked at the interaction between these two different genes. We have no idea about how those risks combine. They are unlikely to be independent.
Therefore, one test might tell you you are 20% more likely to get Alzheimers, because they looked at gene 1, and another test might tell you you are 30% less likely, because they looked at gene 2. Neither test is wrong, but neither result is complete.
We should be skeptical of these results. When they say you are 15% more likely to develop Alzheimers than the average person, they might be right. Or they might not be right.
@m0minmd “Both of my parents are gone, so I can’t go there with them. I look at my inlaws and I am really sure they would push back on it. H would push back as well. (genetics?) I doubt my B would go for this too. I think they’d think this was really intrusive. Me? I think it’d be fun. But I am the odd one and they all know it.”
You can learn about your ancestry lot by just doing a few basic things. To start, just get any information your family has documented. Surprisingly, many people can’t even name their great grandparents, or don’t know their first or maiden names, or their siblings.
Then I would construct a basic family tree online. I would use Ancestry, and I think you can construct a basic tree for free. I believe it only cost money if you want to use their database.
Then I would take the Ancestry DNA test your self. You will get a significant amount of information from this. Both in terms of countries that your ancestors come from and in discovering DNA cousins you are related to. If you are of European descent, there will literally be thousands of these, although I only work to sort out the first couple hundred.
Once people in the family see all of the things that you are learning about the family from doing this, they may become more interested and less likely to think it is “really intrusive” unless they have been actively holding back a family secret.
@scipio “That’s one good reason why it’s easier/better to do genetics research on mice rather than humans. With mice you always know for sure exactly who the father is. With humans that question always hangs over your data, adding error and uncertainty.”
That is why you need both a family tree with a paper trail and DNA test results and matches to construct an accurate tree. If they don’t agree, something is wrong and you need to sort it out.
" if a person has variant A of gene 1, they might be statistically 20% MORE likely to develop Alzheimers, and if they have variant Z of gene 2, they might be statistically 30% LESS likely to develop Alzheimers."
In my 23&Me report I’ve got a bunch of those conflicting genes for heart attack/stroke and also diabetes. In each case I have 3 or 4 variants that put me at higher risk and 3 or 4 others that put me at reduced risk. So far I guess the the good guys are winning. since I have not yet had cardiovascular disease or diabetes.
I know my family tree pretty far back: the 1600’s to the early 1800’s depending on which branch. In many cases, I’ve hit roadblocks. I was thinking that if I knew that my DNA showed part Dutch, for example, I would start searching the Netherlands databases. But if the information is only a certain percentage Northern European and not more specific, then I’m still stuck searching too many databases.
When you say you know your family tree back to the 1600s, what does that mean? Let’s say that is 13 generations back; you have 4,096 greatx10-grandparents at that level. Being able to identify one or two of those 4,096 is pretty cool from a detective perspective, but from a genetic perspective, those individuals contributed only a very miniscule amount of your DNA.
That’s why genealogy always seemed so futile to me; even if I were able to trace an ancestor back to the 1600s, knowing the identity of one out of 4,096 or 8,192 of the ancestors at that level seems almost kind of random to me. That single individual is almost insignificant in the overall picture of my heritage. And trying to be any sort of completist would obviously be impossible.
Anyway, I’m not meaning to be critical, but I’m curious how those with an interest in genealogy deal with that reality in thinking about the significance of their findings.
It’s a great question, nottelling. Honestly, when you first start out and you look at all your branches, you find pretty quickly that some branches will be dead ends for various logistical reasons. For example: on my Irish side, I trace back to a John Kane from County Tyrone. There must be thousands of men with that name who emigrated in the relevant time frame. It’s just the equivalent of John Smith. There’s really no way I can identify “mine.” So I abandoned that branch.
And as you go through records, you just find certain branches easier to go up. For example, I did my father’s father’s father’s family, but when I got there, I found that his mother was part of a prominent family in Poland, with lots of records. So I went up her tree a few levels.
And some branches just aren’t interesting for whatever idiosyncratic reason. On my Latvian side, I’ve just never bothered to go past my great grandparents and find out exactly when they came over, what ship, etc. Maybe one day I’ll learn the particulars of the Latvian databases but probably I won’t.
I also had a particular interest in my “pure maternal” line, though that was also pretty easy to indulge as it was German/Bavarian with impeccable records. Yes, Elisabetha from 1698 is only 1/x of my heritage, but it’s pretty cool that she gave birth to Margaretha, who gave birth to a girl, who gave birth to a girl, and so forth through my mother and me.
But yes, there’s no way anyone can be a completist. You fill in what you can and you’ll always have tons of dead ends that you ignore.
@nottelling “Anyway, I’m not meaning to be critical, but I’m curious how those with an interest in genealogy deal with that reality in thinking about the significance of their findings.”
That is a great question actually.
For me, being adopted, and starting from nothing, I have been able to construct my DNA family tree completely back to 3G grandparents for me (all 32 of them) and 4G grandparents for my kids (all 64 of them). Many lines go further, but that is the length of the shortest dead end lines.
As you say, It certainly is not complete back to Adam (metaphorically), but it does give me a good sense of where my ancestors came from, and it is something to share with my kids and pass down. I also add information like where they lived, photos, stories, and what people did for an occupation. I think makes them more real. A lot of it for me is also that I enjoy the puzzle/process of sorting out and verifying the tree as much as the result.
Also everyone takes a different approach, but I tend to spend the most time and effort trying to solve the shortest lines, because as, you mention, when they get further back you may no really have any DNA for some of those ancestors even if the tree is correct, and the further back you go, the greater the chance for an error, and the more difficult it is to use DNA to verify people. Currently, 5th Great Grand parents are the furthest back that I have been able to verify using DNA matching (DNA Circles). Maybe you could go another couple of generations, but then I think the DNA fragments would get so small that it would be very difficult.
Given that Ashkenazi Jews have been almost entirely an endogamous population for the last 1,500 years or so (for rather obvious reasons), knowing the identity of one or two of my direct ancestors who lived in the 1600s – actually, in my case, more than 40 of them – almost certainly means that those ancestors are also related to me in various other ways. Especially given the fact that first cousin marriages were extremely common among Ashkenazi Jews in Europe up to the late 19th century (especially in places, like Pomerania in northeast Prussia, where most Jews still lived in relatively small towns and villages where there wasn’t a large pool of unrelated marriage partners in the area). For example, my maternal grandfather’s paternal grandparents Lesser and Lina were first cousins to each other. And Lina’s own parents were first cousins to each other as well. Plus, Lesser’s sister Caecilie married Lina’s brother Salomon; another first cousin marriage. And then Lesser’s and Lina’s daugher Klara married Caecilie’s and Salomon’s son Leo – a double first cousin marriage. To the point where Klara’s and Leo’s children had, if I remember correctly, only 6 different individuals as great-great-grandparents instead of the usual complement of 16!
More importantly, it means a lot to me to know not just names and dates for as many as possible of my ancestors, who had lived in Europe for considerably more than a millennium, but as much as I can about their lost world, and their lives – a world that changed over the centuries, but was entirely destroyed within living memory. It’s my connection to them. And every time I learn even a little bit about another one, I feel like I’ve lit a symbolic candle to their memory. Besides, knowing what I do, the 1600s don’t seem that long ago at all to me in terms of degrees of separation. When I say that my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandfather’s grandfather was named Jakob Weyl, and that he was born in 1695 in Stühlingen and died in 1764 in Emmendingen, and then that Jakob’s own great-grandfather, my 9th great-grandfather Marum Weyl, was born in about 1595 and died during Lent in 1677 in Zurzach (where he was staying temporarily to avoid the war then going on in the Tiengen area), I feel that I know them both at least a little bit. Because I know something about their lives, and the lives of all my forefathers and foremothers in between.
And, as Pizzagirl mentioned, it’s somehow even more meaningful to me to think of my direct maternal line, and know that I can go back 9 generations – to my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandmother’s maternal grandmother’s maternal grandmother’s mother Hüene (Hina) Brunschwig geb. Lévy, born ca. 1675 and d. in April 1740 in Cernay (Sennheim) Alsace – and know something about all my foremothers in between. I know that I learned how to be a good parent from my mother, and she told me that she learned from her mother, who told her in turn that she learned from her own mother and grandmother (both of whom were particularly proud that all of their children lived to adulthood). And so on, back through time.
By the way, regarding those ethnicity percentages one gets from the various companies who analyze autosomal DNA – whether FTDNA, or Ancestry, or 23andme, or from uploading to Gedmatch and using their tools – it’s very important to remember that unless you come from a very endogamous population like the Ashkenazi Jews, where almost all of the admixture from other ethnicities until the mid-20th century happened 1,500-2,500 years ago, one can’t rely too much on the accuracy of what they tell you. In my case, for example, Ancestry’s estimate was 97% European Jewish, and 3% “trace amounts” including “Italy/Greece” and “Western European.” And it’s very likely to be accurate. (After all, I know the names of > 250 direct ancestors going back as far as about 1540, and every one of them was Jewish.) The Gedmatch analysis was similar – almost entirely Ashkenazi Jewish, with small amounts of Sicilian/South Italian, Greek, Tuscan, and North Italian. All of which is consistent with the genetic (and historical) studies showing that the Ashkenazi Jewish population (as well as the Sephardic Jewish population, before they largely, but not entirely, separated) originated with intermarriages 1,500-2,500 years ago between Jewish men from the Near East (traders, merchants, and others) living in Southern European lands controlled by the Romans – today’s southern Spain, southern France, Italy, Greece, the Balkans, etc. – and local European women who converted to Judaism. (Obviously, that kind of intermarriage stopped with the rise of Christianity in Europe, when conversions to Judaism became illegal, and a Jew could not marry a Gentile without first converting to Christianity). Which also explains why many of the more common Jewish mitochondrial DNA lineages bear a close resemblance to Italian MtDNA lineages.
However, for the majority of non-Jewish Europeans, who don’t belong to endogamous populations, it’s basically impossible to draw fine distinctions between different ethnicities and nationalitie, like German vs. French vs. Dutch or whatever. Never mind the English. Especially given all the migrations and intermarriages between different peoples in Europe over the last couple of thousand years – really the fundamental flaw underlying these estimates, which are based on DNA databases of people who live in particular countries or geographical locations NOW, not 500 or 1,000 years ago. I’ve been trying to explain this to people for a while, but I think it’s summarized best at http://www.legalgenealogist.com/2016/08/14/those-percentages-if-you-must/:
I just think genealogy is fun. I’m not looking for anything specific. The only famous people in my family are living family members- no connection to royalty way back when.
Some of my family is easy to track. I have the British line back to the 1600, 1500s because they all lived in this same county and went to the same church for 400+ years. The Hungarian/Roma side I can’t get past my great-grandparents because they were Roma and didn’t really keep records except for some scant church records. The others are somewhere in between.
Mr R’s family was super fun to trace though. We found out his grandma was Burt Reynolds’ cousin and that his great-grandparents who he had always been told were German immigrants actually lived in an Mennonite (or something similar- not Amish) community in Ohio for generations. They only spoke German. Quite a shock to Mr R’s parents who are always whining about immigrants not learning “our” language. 8->
I don’t think following my ancestry is going to “accomplish” anything. I just think it’s fun. But, I’m a historian so maybe it’s an extension of that.
Thank you @pizzagirl@Much2learn@DonnaL and @romanigypsyeyes for that explanation. It’s fascinating! And a big thank you for including the names in your posts. Just reading those beautiful names – Elisabetha, Margaretha, Lina, Caecilie, Klara, etc. – gives a visceral emphasis to your point. There is a strange power in names – just hearing those names helps me to understand the point of the quest. There are stories in those names. Just the act of focusing attention on these names and the stories behind them honors them. I love the idea that studying them is like lighting a candle in their honor. I like the idea that the genetic link becomes a jumping off point that makes the details of these perhaps ordinary lives suddenly become of extraordinary interest – every detail that you can uncover is intensely interesting.
You have made me think that I might like genealogy after all, not because of what it would reveal about myself, but more as an entry point into the sort of rabbit-hole mild obsessiveness that I enjoy. I could see it being like finding a stranger’s diary in a thrift shop, or even noticing a group of poignant headstones in a graveyard – that kind of thing gets my imagination going, sparking an intense curiosity about strangers that you might not otherwise pay attention to.
So I could see how finding out a few biographical details about an ancestor could spark the desire for more – sparking that pleasant quasi-obsessive feeling that a good quest induces, but with historical resonance and perhaps meaning in one’s own life.
I honestly had never thought of this before. So thank you!
To me genealogy is interesting because it is the history of this country told in individual stories. The stories of the common people rather than the famous people.
For example, I have the diaries of my German ancestors. They came in 1833 to escape the oppression of the dukes of the area where they lived. They wrote letters back home to tell how life was in America. They told their German relatives about what to bring, how much money they needed, that they needed to know English, that there wouldn’t be any good theater or music on the frontier, what kind of housing to expect and what kind of people the Americans were.
Then I learned the life of an ordinary person in the Civil War. Why did they fight for the Union? Why did one ggguncle who owned a couple of slaves still fight for the Union?
It is the history of the country told through the lives of the common man. It is a more nuanced view of history than what one reads in books.
