I looked a promethese …it is a bit intimidating. Is the 23&me health data basically the same in readable form?
I can’t figure out Promethease at all. Ancestry emphasizes the human element.
It’s way too easy to get bad information from other people’s family trees, though. I am having to go back and undo mistakes I made early on, and that’s difficult.
What is the standard way of annotating births you know are illegitimate? My sister is doing my family tree. We have Eric Johnson, the son of Abigail Tomkins. Abigail married William Johnson ten years after Eric was born. (All names fake.)
We have a long ancestry of William, but he’s not our ancestor. I doubt there’s any way to figure out who Eric’s bio father was.
of course there is always the issues with the mother not being listed correctly in a family history. I know that doesn’t make sense, but how many of us know a family where the young daughter is pregnant and then the baby is then raised by her parents so the grandmother is now considered the mother.
Just getting around to looking more closely at my DNA results and I’m curious about the “lesser” hits… forgot what site calls them but guess they are statistically insignificant but listed. Anyone else have “Iberian Peninsula” ? And have others found the actual country “breakdown” in terms of locale correct? Ex Ireland: Cork I’m somewhat skeptical that this is possible…
Probably some of the high school students who got the same and now want to check “Hispanic or Latino” on college applications even though they never previously identified as such or were identified by others as such…
My future DIL has around 40% Iberian Peninsula in hers, but given that she’s from Puerto Rico, that’s not surprising at all.
I just ordered a test kit from My Heritage. My 1st cousin just did hers and on her matches it came up with another of our first cousin’s son as a match - and correctly identified him as a first cousin once removed. That cousin’s also showed a match with his mom’s paternal side (her uncle’s daughter.)
The test did match with what we know of our family from the history done by my mom’a first cousin.
My mom is also going to do it.
My cousin’s came back 86.2% Ashkenazi, 7% Sephardic Jewish - North African, 5%Italian and 1.8% Finnish.
We think the Italian might be from her father’s side but will see what mine and my mom’s (her mom’s sister) come up with.
My daughter and I completed the 23 and Me DNA test. Our test came out predictable, disappointing, and gave us a good laugh.
My results said I was 100% European. The bulk of my ancestors come from the British Isles, Ireland, France and Germany. No surprise there. The results also showed ancestors all across Europe. For ex. 2% Italian, 1.8% Balkan etc. The disappointing part of my results was that I don’t have any American Indian in me. Part of our family stories include one about my great, great grandfather marrying a Cherokee Indian. I know there’s a lot of scenarios that could have played out as to why I have no Native American in me. Just surprising that’s all.
For my daughter who is adopted from China, her results came out as South and East Asian. So no surprise there. However, her results did show a match of 2% American Indian! We had a good chuckle over that.
It was fun and I would do it again.
Yikes! Just did the the Promethease thing with 23andme and … well … lets just say that I’m doomed! I have:
- A magnitude 6.7 issue with Biotinidase deficiency. AFAIK, I have never been in a coma or died as an infant.
- The test properly identified me as male but with only a magnitude of 4?!? I just checked and, yep, I'm a male.
- I'm a poor metabolizer of several medicines but I won't know it because --
- I have a 2X risk of Alzheimers.
- I have reduced abilities related to neurocognition, the ability to recognize faces, and cognitive ability along with an increased risk of ADHD and schizophrenia
- A whopping 18.5x risk of type-1 diabetes!
- Ain't no way I'm taking any SSRI's because I have a 3.6x risk of sexual dysfunction with them!
- I think that cilantro tastes like soap. Yes, I pick out as much of the cilantro as I can out of salsa.
It did correctly say that I “probably” have lighter skin, am hair-challenged, and have blue eyes. My eyes are actually a weirdo light blue/green color (think Meg Foster but with a green tint).
However, the overall risk of type 1 diabetes is low, so even an 18.5 times higher risk is still not that high.
I haven’t done mine yet, but my daughter has and her result came back whiter than white. The most exotic part of her profile was a tiny little smidgen from the Iberian Peninsula. I’d like to think it came from my side, since I love Spain so much, but who knows. I had harbored a hunch that my Grandmother’s family had some Askenazi Jewish heritage, but nope. Doesn’t seem like it.
@ucbalumnus – thanks for the reassuring words! 
Digging deeper into the results, I’m glad I’m not female because there’s an increased risk of alcohol and nicotine dependence from rs806368(C;C). I’m also glad I’m not Chinese because rs1265159(T;T) would have resulted in a 22X risk of psoriasis!
In contradiction to item #5 in my earlier post, due to rs53576(G;G) I’m optimistic, empathetic, handle stress well, am significantly better at accurately reading the emotions of others by reading their faces, and less likely to be startled when blasted by a loud noise!.
Oh … and I have rs4680(G;G), the “warrior” gene variant. SNPedia.com says it’s Warrior. Val, less exploratory, higher COMT enzymatic activity, therefore lower dopamine levels; higher pain threshold, better stress resiliency, albeit with a modest reduction in executive cognition performance under most conditions. What’s with this constant thread of having a “modest reduction in executive cognition performance under most conditions” in my genes??? Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand the results. Should this be renamed the “knee-jerk reaction” gene?
You know, I really should hit the track at D18’s HS again. I have rs1815739(C;T) which results in the “mix of muscle types, likely sprinter”. Or maybe not, because it says “normal for white people” but may “indicate somewhat impaired muscles”. Maybe the gene/mutation is actually encoding for “likes to watch college football”, in which case it is 100% accurate.
Nowhere in these results are the actual strange things, namely, the lack of wisdom teeth! Never had 'em. The only thing I’ve found online is that there’s a tribe in Central America that has a high incidence of this condition/blessing.
Bottom line: our understanding of genetics has a long way to go before it’s meaningful!
Very late to the party here, but I’m enjoying reading about people’s experiences. I was tested by Ancestry a few years ago, and I gave my mother a test for Christmas. For the most part, the test confirmed what I’d expected from extensive genealogical research: I’m between 50-65% Finnish (Ancestry puts ethnic Finns in Swedish-speaking regions of Finland into the Scandinavian category), about 25% Eastern European, and about 12.5% Cornish. Ancestry categorizes the Cornish people as Irish, but I have 300+ years of documentation in that line showing no Irish ancestors.
Then there were a few more interesting parts. My English great-great-grandmother E was illegitimate. The year before she was born, her mother was living away from Cornwall in a different part of Britain. I suspect that E was conceived there, and my genetic results would generally agree–2% of my DNA came back as generic British. I also have a tiny bit of DNA from the Iberian Peninsula, so I wonder if that was also from E’s mysterious father.
My mother’s DNA was pretty much what I anticipated, as well, though it did show far more Western European than mine (25% vs <1%). We both have a little bit of DNA that Ancestry categorizes as Native American, but I suspect it’s Sami, since her relatives came from a part of Scandinavia with large Sami populations.
I haven’t made a lot of exciting connections with relatives, but I did get to help out one woman in an interesting way. The brother of my great-grandmother M lived in our area for decades and had a prosperous farm, founded a town, gained American citizenship, etc. In 1912, for reasons unknown, he uprooted his wife and three very young kids and moved to the Canadian prairies, never to be heard from again. I haven’t been able to find a single document about his life after he crossed the border into Canada. Did he stay there? Did he move to a different part of America? Did he return to Finland?
Late last year, a woman on Ancestry whose mother had been adopted contacted me after we came up as a DNA match. She had just been able to gain access to her mother’s adoption file and determined what her birth name was. It was the Anglicized version of M’s family’s name. The DNA match still lives in the prairie province, so evidently this last big move was final for M’s brother. Although we don’t know exactly how she fits into the tree, I was able to provide her with a substantial sketch of her roots, something she’d never had before. She was thrilled.
On another note, I’m still chuckling about how many people earlier in the thread were surprised that the Finns had mass migrations. Yes, we really did, especially to the United States! Studying them is one of the key parts of my job. 
I had a 2nd cousin in Scotland make contact through ancestry.com a few days ago. I did not think there was anyone left in Scotland. But, now I know my grandfather had one sister who remained in Scotland. The cousin and I are now Facebook friends and she would love a reunion in Scotland!
The test confirmed what I thought it would- Scottish, English, Scandinavian (Swedish), but it was fun doing. My H did the test too and he is really enjoying building his family tree.
Brother did it and got contacted by some distant cousins. He didn’t know who they were but they were all known to my Dad and Uncle. Resulted in spat of catching up with the family phone calls which is kind of neat.
Seems like anyone with Celtic ancestry gets that tiny dab of Iberian Peninsula. Came up on my Irish/German dad’s test too.
There are other testing companies than Ancestry and 23andme. One focuses on British Isles genealogy. It separates English and Celt DNA,but the company says that it is not currently possible to separate Irish and Scottish. If you read the small print, Ancestry admits it can’t do this either. I did My Heritage and submitted the DNA results to Family Tree DNA, which assigned significantly different ethnicity.
If any of you are as “into” genealogy as I am, I recommend GedMatch . It’s a free site. If you upload your DNA to it, you can compare your results to people who took the test with different companies. You also use a real email address, so you can contact each other without going through the company.
I had my first break through with DNA. I don’t know exactly how we connect, but…I had this pretty big chunk of DNA on my ex chromosome that matched someone else. Her surname was the same as my mom’s maiden name, so I thought that was the connection. Then a relative on my dad’s side uploaded his DNA and matched the same person, though not on the X chromosome. I emailed again and listed all my known relatives the right # of generations back. We had one surname in common. We can’t figure out the connection–but she’s an emigrant from a small town in Ireland. My great grandfather had an extremely common name. However, I limited my search for his baptismal record to that small town and…now I know where he was born :)!
We’ve located a few lost relatives through DNA testing. My mom found a long lost 1st cousin. Additionally a set of twin brothers reached out to me after showing up as a match on multiple sites to my family. We were able to figure out that my grandmother’s 1st cousin gave their father up for adoption back in the 1940s. They have been reunited with their grandmother’s younger sister who loves genealogy and was very welcoming to them.
I posted this on the California serial killer thread, but I wanted to add it here too.
Apparently one of these DNA kits lead to the arrest of the Golden State serial killer (AKA as the East Side Rapist and Original Night Stalker)!