I love the ads on TV about people finding out where they really came from vs. where they thought. Any experiences here?
Hubby and I also really enjoy Henry Louis Gates show “Finding Your Roots”. Always interesting.
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My S did the one of them last year (he’s adopted from Korea) and all it showed was 100% Asian. He was kind of disappointed that it wasn’t broken down further - especially since Korea was invaded numerous times by the Chinese, and Japanese.
Love Finding Your Roots, too!
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My husband just sent his off. I wonder what the wait time is? Meanwhile he’s been researching online farther up the branches of the family tree that we are sure of. Interesting stuff.
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I thought I might find a little Native American in me given that my family has been in this country since the 1600s and on the frontier too. But I am 100% Northern European with a tiny bit of Ashkenazi and Finnish. The last were the only surprises.
I have a woman listed as my 1st or 2nd cousin. She is in her sixties so I’m almost positive she isn’t my first cousin. So I figure, one of her parents would have to be my grandparents siblings. Well my maternal grandmothers siblings are all still living including my grandma , and I knew all of my paternal grandmas siblings. Anyhoo, she says she knows her mom and dad but the am convinced someone is not being truthful and perhaps her father may have been a great uncle of mine. She seems to be in denial. AncestryDNA is quite accurate. I haven’t spoken to one of my first cousins in years and she must’ve opened an account after I opened mine. The next time I logged in she was listed as possible 1st-2nd cousin.
I also reached out to two people listed as 3rd-4th cousins , and we found out our great grandparents were brother and sister.
My neighbor gave it to her mother as a gift. Ten months later my neighbor’s daughter was contacted by someone on Facebook who claimed to be her cousin. Apparently he had a DNA analysis, and was able to discover relatives of his father, who he never met. Yes, my neighbor’s brother had an illegitimate child that nobody ever knew about. Her mother’s analysis provided the information necessary for her brother’s child to connect the dots.
My neighbor was very upset…for a lot of reasons.
My niece had hers done. I don’t have any ancestors she doesn’t have, and her ancestry was the most boring Northern European roots possible. We were hoping for some surprises, but no.
There are some issues with all of the DNA tests. Each DNA company has slightly different populations so each breaks down ethnicities somewhat differently. Ancestry separates English and Irish. 23andme lumps British Isles together. One of the other companies divides celts and English–so Irish, Welsh, Scottish are in the same category, but it’s a separate category from English.
A friend of mine has had 5 different tests with different companies and gotten slightly different ethnic mixes from each–varying as much as 10%.
@partyof5 Another concern is that you can show up as more closely related than you really are if you are related in more than one way. When you’re dealing with small pools of population, that’s common. That could be what’s going on in your case. (I am NOT saying it IS what is going on–only that it’s possible.)
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There are also issues regarding who owns your genetic information. One of them (23 and me??) sells your genetic info to drug companies who may try to sell you a drug for a genetic condition you may or may not want to know about. Lots of privacy issues.
My maternal family is Slavic and we always thought some aspects of our appearance came from ancient eastern marauders. My mother did the National Geographic test and lo, it’s Finnish links.
23 and me claims not to pass your info to 3rd parties.
Have you all read every page of this document?
https://www.23andme.com/about/privacy/
I have not, as I have no interest in any genealogical stuff even though I work with folks who create tools for testing DNA…
I guess DNA testing is a fun exercise for some people, but I think the whole subject is being given way too much importance by these companies. The commercial where the woman finds out she’s part Nigerian, puts on a headdress, and starts going on about her new found “culture” particularly annoys me. Her ancestry may be Nigerian, but she was born and raised in the US, so her “culture” has nothing to do with Nigeria unless her family actually retained some Nigerian customs or traditions, which they clearly didn’t, since this was all a surprise to her. Sticking on a headdress doesn’t provide you with a different identity. How you live your life is all that matters.
My DD’s very good friend was adopted as an infant. Her adoptive parents are wonderful people and loving parents. In search of her history, she did the 23andMe test in May, but it only connected her with very distant relatives. She uploaded her info to all the free DNA sites, but still no luck. Then she did the ancestry.com test in July, which connected her with a first-second cousin. After some more research on her part to build her tree and then contacting the cousin, she found her birth parents. By the end of September, she had met both of them.
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I wouldn’t judge how people are going to react by what their DNA says by the companiy’s commercials.
TBS, I didn’t know until several years ago that I am Sephardic and Ashkenazi. I can’t tell you why this has made a difference in how I see myself but it does. Maybe it’s just knowing I’m not exactly what I thought my heritage/ancestry was.
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My daughter was a little disappointed to find out no interesting or unexpected ancestry—mix of British Isles, northern European, and Eastern European. She got one for her boyfriend, an international student, and his apparently was just as homogenous—mix of Arabian peninsula and “other” Middle Eastern. Neither was too illuminating. As she said, “basic white girl meets basic brown boy.”
I met a distant relative on a recent trip to Ireland. The trip was planned shortly before I did the DNA test that showed I was a 4th or 5th cousin to an Irish young lady. I contacted her after I got my DNA test results and we got together in County Galway at a pub. She studies Irish genealogy but records aren’t available that many generations back so we don’t know exactly how we are related. She was surprised to learn she has American relatives because her family lore is that her ancestors were well enough off such that no relatives emigrated during the potato famine.
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My husband has an ancestor who came from England in 1630 and was a founding family of Hartford, CT. My husband’s DNA showed 0.8% (less than 1%) Native American. That was a surprise!
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Hmm, Madison. My husband also has ancestors back to 1630 and that area of CT.
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Ancestery genetics is a parlor game, in my opinion. Fun, but nothing more. We have done some testing for health data purposes and the percentages from various parts of the world differ among my kids. Obviously siblings aren’t more or less “from” a place than each other and their family culture is the same. Their South American family history gave each of them some Native American, for example, though only one got some rare darker skin gene (which was reported under traits and is reflected in appearance). They all have some Ashkenazi Jew although we don’t know of any actual relatives - probably a combination of European genetics from both parents going much further back than 23andme states. About five minutes’ worth of fun.
The bottom line is that their ancestry genetics reflect their culture (in a broad, general sense of combination European and South American) but do not contribute to it.
Probably many men with ancestry in the former Mongol Empire (from eastern Europe to eastern Asia) will find through these services that they have what is commonly called the “Genghis Khan” Y chromosome. But few of them would self-identify as Mongolian, probably usually just seeing it as a curiousity.