That’s great. It puts the guilt away and can exonerate the innocent.
Are you a senator from Massachusetts?
While DNA evidence matching from many samples at many crime scenes (like presumably this case) can be pretty strong, one must be careful about DNA evidence found in a single crime scene that may have been shed by an innocent person and unintentionally transported to the crime scene to be found there.
Our family (and probably 1/2 of those in the S Central states) had the same legend.
But turning up with zero Native American DNA doesn’t mean you have zero Native American ancestors. (But like me you probably don’t ). The half you got from one parent is random and may not include the markers for all of his or her ancestors.
My husband and his siblings have all done ancestoryDNA and have very different “heritage” %
Got my kit and will do the test tomorrow and mail it in.
@jonri, several of my family members have uploaded to GedMatch so I’ll be doing that once I get my results.
Mitochondrial DNA could work for tracking Native American ancestry if there is an uninterrupted female line to a fully NA ancestress. Of course if the Cherokee great-great had a non-NA mother, or matermal grandmother, or maternal grandmother’s mother, etc. well then the mitochondiral DNA wouldn’t work for that.
Yep, I did the National Geographic test years ago. My maternal line is a rare mix of the usual suspects…N Europe and the Isles but through a late (relatively speaking) path. Of course once you go back that far it’s an infinitely small part of your DNA
@twoinanddone hmmm…maybe Senator Warren and I are related.
We too were told our brown eyes were from our Indian ancestry. Unless those Native Americans somehow got to Ireland, I don’t think so because we’ve traced back to before American grandparents.
It seems so strange that so many of us were told stories of interracial marriage at a time (50’s and 60’s) that such things were not common. My parents shocked the world with their marriage because while each is half English and half Irish, my mother is Catholic and my father was, gasp, Episcopalian (although his Irish father was Catholic). My mother’s parents were divorced and we were lead to believe they were dead (she was raised by an aunt and uncle). But having an Indian great-something grandmother was okay?
I work with a woman who was adopted and did a test to try to get a medical history for her children. She found 4 paternal half siblings. The half siblings all had the same mom. Her birth mom and the half siblings’ mom were sisters, and I’m sure you can guess which sister was the dad’s wife. All the older generation are gone, so they don’t actually know the situation. My friend is the eldest and her dad didn’t marry her aunt until a few years after she was born, so the dad may have cheated or he may have dated one sister but ended up with the other after the first relationship didn’t work out. The siblings are all happy to have found each other though.
I know someone else who did a test for fun some years after her dad passed away and found out she had a secret half brother who she knew in passing because they attended the same high school. The half brother was younger than my friend and a couple of her brothers, but older than my friend’s younger brother and sister, so definitely born during the marriage. My friend’s mom was stunned and more than a little upset that the dad was no longer around to give any answers. My friend and her siblings that are older than the half brother seem to have had an easier time accepting him than her younger brother and sister, probably because the infidelity happened after they were born.
I guess if you do these tests it helps to be open-minded because you never know what you’re going to find.
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My maternal cousin and I grew up together. Her father died when she was very young, and had no family in this area. There was a family story about having Native American ancestry on that side, but never knew for sure. She did a test recently and found out that she is actually half Native American. Upon doing further research (she did the test as a lark and hadn’t previously had any interest in genealogy), she found that her father’s entire lineage was Native American, and that she had close relatives living in the culture.
The stories about finding out about infidelities and surprise siblings don’t surprise me, but the fact that these tests helped find a very prolific serial killer and rapist did. It really opens up a lot of wonderful possibilities in terms of solving cold crimes.
That blew me away. What an amazing use for this technology. (I won’t do the testing because it seems odd to me to allow anyone outside of a medical professional to have access to the stuff that “is” me … not that I think anyone in my family is a criminal, but I just don’t want the world to be able to use the building blocks of my body against me or my family in any way.)
I wonder if having everyone’s DNA available to the police wouldn’t cut down on crime, at least on stranger on stranger crime. The sort of cold blooded crimes that the Golden State killer committed. If criminals knew for a certainty that they would be caught and identified they might not commit crime or would not be able to go on years long crime sprees undetected. This wouldn’t cut down on crimes of passion, those committed with no thought to the consequences.
For the innocent, DNA testing is a really good thing. Eye witness identification can be very unreliable.
However, innocent people can shed DNA that can inadvertently get to crime sites before or after the crime, or criminals may try to plant items with others’ DNA at crime sites, so it is not a given that DNA found at a single crime site means guilt.
I doubt if planting DNA is very common at all. But if a person is accused of committing a crime in their own home, car or workplace then the DNA is not going to point to that person as the culprit since their DNA would be expected to be there.
In the story linked in reply #215, the DNA of someone innocent to the homicide was unintentionally transported to the scene of the homicide, causing the innocent person to be accused of participating in the crime.
Here’s another link to SacBee about the DNA testing in general:
http://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article209908769.html
CA authorities have run 192 familial searches since 2007. Towards the bottom of that article there’s the story of how they caught “Roaming Rapist” Derek Sanders – because his brother, who was also a convicted rapist, had DNA in the computer database. What family raises two rapist sons???
I got my results today. I’m 92.7% Ashkenazi Jewish; 6.0% North and Western European; 1.3% Sephardic Jewish-North African.
My mom, plus my two cousins who did it on My Heritage came up as matches, but the surprising matches are two with my maiden name - with enough similar DNA to match as estimated Great Uncle or first cousin and first cousin once removed. We have very little information on my grandfather or his family as he died when my dad was 15. Both have Russian first names (Iosif and Vladimir) so I’m thinking they likely didn’t immigrate until 70’s or 80’s. These were my 5 top matches (out of 6000+)