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I've been involved in direct-to-consumer genetic testing for about 6 years now and can answer all your your questions! Or I could, if I had more time. I'll try to hit some major points, but a lot of the answers to your questions require lengthy, somewhat technical explanations. First, there are 4 major players: 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, National Geographic and Ancestry.com. Do not be fooled, there is a company called "AncestrybyDNA" and they are NOT the same thing as Ancestry.com. AncestrybyDNA is a total scam, their results are complete junk, and they're in the process of being sued by Ancestry.com. Do not use them and do not think that they're the same as Ancestry.com. What you said about only testing the Y chromosome or the mitochondrial DNA is untrue. All four of the listed companies test autosomal DNA, which comes from all your chromosomes. FamilyTreeDNA has two separate products which will test ONLY the Y or ONLY the mitochondria, but their "FamilyFinder" test is autosomal. Here is a chart from the International Society of Genetic Genealogists comparing the 4 tests: http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_testing_comparison_chart More later, as I have time.
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Jan 4, 2016 20:08
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The tests are really best used to augment traditional genealogy, where you have an already-researched family tree, and you use the DNA to help prove that it's correct, and figure out which bits of your DNA came from which ancestors (and eventually, hopefully reconstruct at least part of the genome of those ancestors.) It's also useful for people who are adopted, donor-conceived, of unknown paternity or any other situation where you don't know who your bio family is. Adopted people can use these tests to find their bio family. It's not always immediate; it can take several years of waiting for a good, solid match to appear, and it can also take a lot of detective work to figure it out if you don't have any really close matches. The tests do all give ethnicity estimates, but they're just that: estimates. They're a work in progress, and they get better as time goes by and more people are tested. Each of the companies has their own algorithms for computing ethnicity, and they're all pretty different. Honestly, 23andMe's ethnicity prediction is the best by a long shot, but most non-genealogists find those results to be not what they were hoping for. The real problem is people's lack of realistic understanding about it. I hear a lot of people say "well, I want it to tell me what town in what country my family is from." Each person has two parents, and they have two parents. That means we all have 4 grandparents, and 8 great-grandparents. It is highly, highly unlikely that all 8 of your great-grandparents were from the same area. Now go back a few more generations: 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 great-great-great-grandparents, 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents, 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. Definitely not all from the same little town somewhere.
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Jan 4, 2016 20:33
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twofive1 posted:In the ad for 23 and me they make it seem like this would be a good way to get an idea of your family's medical history. Do they actually provide enough information to be useful? There have been quite a few 23andMe customers who have discovered serious genetic conditions that they would not have known about otherwise, and in some cases it has been very beneficial for them. Those are fringe cases though. Very little of what is reported is "actionable," as in, it's just an increased or decreased risk about a condition that you likely cannot do anything to prevent. Things like "you have a 20% increased risk of psoriasis." Most doctors will tell you that a solid family health history is a million times more valuable. But not all of us have that. I'm a case of unknown paternity myself, so I only have my mother's half of the family history. On my father's side, they could all drop dead at age 35 of a brain aneurysm and I'd have no clue. Adoptees have zero family health history. So if you're in a situation where there's little to no health history, this is better than nothing, which is honestly why I did it in the first place. Then I got hooked. My own results showed that I was a carrier for hemochromatosis. I don't HAVE it, but I carry it, and I could theoretically have children who had it, if my husband also carried it. Therefore, when it was time to have kids, we got him tested for it to see if he was a carrier. He fortunately was not, so we didn't have to worry about any kids having inherited the disorder. Three Olives posted:The FDA made them stop offering almost all of the medical stuff but you can load the data into Promethease for like $5 and get the same stuff basically. Yes and no on this. Yes, the FDA did put a halt to medical results for a year or two, but they now have FDA-approval and will be offering medical results for all new users and old users who tested on the current (V4) chip, which is basically all customers who tested in the past 1.5 to 2-ish years? I can't recall when the new health results become available, but I think it's sometime this spring? My results are so old that it's doesn't affect me, hence me not knowing the date. And Yes, you can upload your raw data into several 3rd party software tools to get more information from them. Promethease is awesome, gives tons of health-related results, but it tends to give SO much data back that most people have no way of interpreting it. I still recommend it, but just like the ethnicity estimates, it's not exactly what people think they're getting when they enter into this. Mnemosyne fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 21:17
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Moridin920 posted:In a nutshell, my family is from Bulgaria. A region that has been highly contested throughout European history and conquered by many different groups of people in addition to being a region where lots of travel passed through (whether for trade or Scandinavians joining the Varangian Guard or whatever). Turks, Slavs, Mongols, Greeks, etc. I just double-checked 23andMe to see what their Eastern European breakdown looks like. I personally don't have any Eastern European ancestry, so I didn't know how it broke down. I have a friend / cousin match on 23andMe who has some Eastern European ancestry, so I pulled her results up. I turned on the option to see ALL populations, even the ones that she doesn't have so that you can see all of the groups that they break down into. It seems that for Eastern Europe, your only breakdowns are general Eastern Europe and Ashkenazi. Though since you said that you might have ancestry from Southern European countries, that would show. This is what hers looks like: 
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Jan 4, 2016 22:03
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Moridin920 posted:Eh it'd be cool. I don't feel any responsibility for the actions of people who aren't me and who have been dead for years. Unless what you discover is that your father isn't really your father. Or that one of your parents has a different father than they thought they did. While you're not responsible for the actions of those people, you end up having to try to figure out what to reveal to whom. It happens more often than you'd think. Like what do you do if you find that the guy your dad thinks is his dad isn't? You can end up finding that info out accidentally just by testing you, you don't even have to test your dad. Then take it a step further and make it even worse; what if your grandmother was raped by her own father, and so your father's father is actually also his grandfather and he's a rape incest baby? This isn't just theoretical, this is an issue that's shown up more than once. People discover all sorts of things doing these tests. Like the above-mentioned "father is not who you thought." Also many people are adopted and don't know it (more common in older generations, nowadays people are more likely to be open about adoption), or that they were donor-conceived and nobody ever told them (obviously more common in people under the age of 50). Interestingly (to me anyway), there have been very, very few cases of switched-at-birth. It's a thing we talk about in our culture as though it happened a lot more frequently than it seems to have. The other scenarios crop up very frequently. As far as what people expect to get vs what they get, it's like I was saying earlier. I literally have people ask me "it can tell me what town my family comes from, right?" and that's just a really dumb expectation for multiple reasons. Something to note regarding the results is that the raw data itself, outside of the website interpreting it for you, does not change. Your DNA is your DNA. So you can take that data and upload it to other, 3rd party sites and possibly get additional information that way. The original site / service will also refine their services over time and will update their interpretation of the data over time. When I first tested with 23andMe 6 years ago, the breakdown didn't look anything like that. There were 3 population groups; European, Asian and African. It looked like this at that time: https://landofpunt.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/23andmeap1.jpg As they have upgraded their service, they have reinterpreted my raw data. I have not purchased any additional tests for myself. It will likely be much more advanced in a few years. But it might also be much cheaper in a few years.
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Jan 5, 2016 00:15
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poo poo, I forgot the part where you asked what made 23andMe's ethnicity estimates better. Here's my results from 23andMe vs Ancestry.com to compare. I only blocked the name out on the other one because the results belonged to someone else. 23andMe  Ancestry  You can probably see how different those are. On my mother's side, I have a lot of my genealogy traced back to the 1600's or at least 1700's, and none of those "trace regions" that Ancestry gives actually show up in my known genealogy. My known genealogy matches with the 23andMe results. Ancestry also misses the tiny chunk of Native American which 23andMe finds. 23andMe also has a different way you can view your ethnicity breakdown, which is the Chromosome view. That shows each of your 23 pairs of chromosomes, and shows you which parts of each one are of what ethnicity. Mine looks pretty boring, because I'm mostly of British Isles descent, but people with more interesting, mixed ancestry have a more interesting result here.  As a genealogist, this view is really nice. It lets me see that my Native American segment is on Chromosome 13 (and I have the start and end points from another tool). With that information, I can look for other matches on any of the DNA services who match me on exactly that location on that Chromosome and start trying to figure out which ancestors we share. Via that method, I can figure out who my Native American ancestor is.
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Jan 5, 2016 02:12
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fyodor posted:They give you your data? Is it on a CD-RW? I'm not sure if this is a joke or not, but no, it's just a plain text file that you download. Looks like this when you open it up:  The letters and numbers at the start of each line are a reference to a SNP.
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Jan 5, 2016 04:02
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Three Olives posted:
The other possibility is that you're part Mexican. Care to show the Chromosome view?
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Jan 5, 2016 04:16
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Woden posted:That's really cool, I figured when you were talking about different algorithms that the different companies used they'd hide all that data like search engines hide theirs. Oh, and that some of them might be just making poo poo up. Only 23andMe shows the breakdown by chromosome. Ancestry and FamilyTreeDNA hide it, but you can just take your raw data from either of those sites and upload it to Gedmatch.com, which will give you about a dozen different 3rd party ethnicity calculators to play around with. They don't look quite as pretty and easy to read as 23andMe's though. JediTalentAgent posted:I'm sort of wondering about these tests on Amazon I haven't heard of them before, so I don't know if they're worthwhile, but based on what I know about testing for Native DNA, I doubt they're worth it. Also, like 90% of America thinks they're descended from Cherokee, and they're almost all wrong. This is another thing I wanted to talk more about, but I'll have to write it up later.
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Jan 5, 2016 04:24
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rakovsky maybe posted:Looks like your just Sicilian or Andalusian or something dude Sorry, Europeans don't show up as Native American.
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Jan 5, 2016 05:32
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I only asked because I recall that you're adopted. I don't know what you know about your bio family, but from this, it looks like your father was Mexican. Native American (Northern) is a possibility, but I think that given that combo of Native / Iberian / Middle Eastern, I think Mexican fits pretty perfectly. We can tell that it's only one parent, because the Native / Middle Eastern / African segments all show up non-overlapping. Which means that one chromosome of each pair is blue (European) and one chromosome is orange / red / purple (non-Euro), so one parent is pretty much all white/Euro and the other parent is not. From there you can tell that it's your father who is likely Mexican (or maybe some other kind of Central American, I don't have any experience looking at the DNA of other Central American groups) because you have one X chromosome, and it's blue / Euro. If you were a woman, you'd have two X chromosomes, one from each parent, and we would be unable to tell which was from which, but since you're a man, you only have one. You got a Y chromosome from your father, and the X from your mother. And since the X is Euro, your mother is the Euro parent and your father is the non-Euro parent. Since Mexicans are a mix of mainly Native and Spanish (southern Euro / Iberian) DNA, your Y chromosome from a Mexican father could be either Native or European in origin. What Y haplogroup does 23andMe give you? Unless you already know about your bio family and you don't care about my analysis of your results.
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Jan 5, 2016 07:00
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Three Olives posted:H2a2a Hm, H2 as a Y haplogroup is pretty rare. Or at least it's rare in the English-speaking world, so it's hard to tell how prevalent it might be elsewhere due to other populations not having been tested much. It looks like H2 likely started around India (we're talking thousands of years ago, not recent Indian ancestry), but is found in lower concentrations as far west as the Iberian peninsula, so that could fit with the Mexican / Hispanic pattern. But with it being an Asiatic haplogroup, that means it might be a Native haplogroup as well, though I never see it mentioned as a Native haplogroup. That doesn't mean it doesn't occur in low concentrations though, since most Native Americans are not very interested in letting the white man have their DNA. And all Native Americans left in America are very mixed at this point anyway. I'd look through your DNA Relatives list, I'm assuming you'll see more than a few with Spanish last names. Are you interested in trying to actually find bio family, or just curious?
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Jan 5, 2016 19:55
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Cuckoo posted:How useful is this for black/mixed black people? I heard that a person of color got one of those tests and it said that some of their ancestry was from "black slaves", with no indication of what kind of black or from where. As you can kind of see from what I was posting regarding Three Olives posts, you can often tell a lot more about people of mixed ancestry. If you look at my own chart, it's pretty much 99.8% blue / Western Euro, and about 90% of that is from the British Isles. It's hard for me to make much progress with "pretty much all of your ancestors are a bunch of limeys." The best my pretty homogeneous results can tell me is when I'm on the wrong track. As mentioned, my paternity is unknown. My mother was sure she knew who my father was. The man in question believed he was my father, his whole family thought he was my father. I had never met him nor his family, so I wasn't invested in it at all. Once I took this DNA test, I started to be curious, so I tracked him down. It was the right guy, and he thought he was my father. I started researching his family and found he was French Canadian, which did not fit with my DNA results (not just the ethnicity results, but the DNA cousin matches and other things). I started saying that I didn't think he was my father and everyone told me I was wrong. Eventually I asked his family to test for me, and they came back as not related to me at all. If I hadn't done the DNA test, I would have never questioned that he was my father. I told her he wasn't my father, and she claimed it was impossible. She pointed me towards the only other boyfriend she says she had in that time period, and I researched his family. Also French Canadian, so he couldn't be my father either. She claimed that there were no other possibilities and it had to be him if it wasn't the first guy. Just to prove that I was right, I DNA tested him. Again, no match. So now she claims that this is impossible, the DNA tests are wrong, and won't tell me anything else. Anyway, more relevant to your own situation; one of my earliest DNA matches (on my mother's side) is a guy who is mostly black but is of mixed black and white ancestry. My ancestry includes a lot of slave-owning southerners. His grandfather was very light-skinned, so the whole family always assumed what most everyone would assume... that there was a black slave woman and a white slave-owning man a few generations earlier. However, the DNA has shown that his Y chromosome (inherited from your father's father's father, etc) is African and from Cameroon. So now we're looking for a black man / white woman combo. I've personally narrowed our connection down to a specific family living around Nash county, North Carolina in the 1700's, but I haven't managed to get more specific than that yet.
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Jan 5, 2016 20:53
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Airborne Viking posted:Could this be because of a Chimera-type issue? Like with Lydia Fairchild? My mother is a homeless heroin addict who has been a lifelong liar. It's much more believable that this is another of her lies than to believe that there's some incredibly rare genetic fuckery going on here. In addition to which, the meat-and-potatoes of what these tests do is match you up with other users based on how much DNA you share. Then you compare your family trees and see who your common ancestor is and how you're related to each other. By testing my mother, I can tell which matches are maternal and which matches are paternal. I have literally thousands of paternal DNA cousins, most very distant (like back in the 1700's, maybe even 1600's). I've spent the past few years contacting these matches, building family trees for them and then connecting those trees to each other to determine how those people are related to each other. Basically if myself and person A, person B and person C all match each other on one big chunk of say, chromosome 12, then I build a family tree for each of those people. Then I see how A, B, and C are related. When I can find the common ancestor between them, I know that that piece of DNA belonged to that person and has been passed down to these descendants. And then I know that person is my ancestor as well, because I have that bit of DNA too. I literally know who quite a few of my ancestors are, just not who my father or grandparents are. It's a strange, backwards situation. But Ancestry.com sold half a million new DNA kits during their sale over the Christmas period, so I expect that sometime in the next 3-4 months, I'll probably get a match that will solve this for me. I'm really close, and I've been really close for about a year now.
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Jan 6, 2016 02:14
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Gravitee posted:For the people who've done the testing, aren't you concerned with privacy and your DNA results being sold for profit? Not really. If my DNA can go to further medical research, then have at it; it's not like I lose anything in the process. Most of these companies are selling and processing these kits at quite a bit of a loss, financially. Reselling the data 3rd party medical companies is the only way they can afford to offer the tests at a price that most people can afford. That being said, both 23andMe and Ancestry.com allow you to opt out of research, so nobody gets your data. When I first started out with all this, I kept the cards a little closer to my chest, but as the years went by and I saw that nothing bad happened to me or anyone else, I slowly relaxed and made more and more info public. I actually participate in the Personal Genome Project: http://personalgenomes.org/ Which is essentially donating your entire genome to science in exchange for getting a full genome sequence for free. The tests that we've been talking about are not a full genome sequence, they're less than a million SNPs (total number depends on which test you take). The Personal Genome Project is a full genome sequence, and for an individual to purchase a full genome sequence, it would cost somewhere in the realm of $5k right now. It was $10k just a few years ago. The project has collected a blood sample from me and I'm in the queue for my full sequence. The project has copies of all of my data from the tests that I myself purchased though, and that is currently available to the public. Anyway, my point is that my data is freely available via the Personal Genome Project to anyone who wants to download it, and pretty much nobody does at this point. You can't even give it away.
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Jan 6, 2016 02:35
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satanic splash-back posted:This makes me curious because my father does not look at all like his family, and my grandmother refused to discuss the subject at all because "that is ridiculous," In order to confirm whether or not he's related, you'd have to end up testing him and also get one of his siblings (or his father, if his father is still alive) to test. A lot of time it's hard to get multiple family members to agree to something like that since a lot of them claim that they don't want to know. If your main goal is to test to see if two people are related or not (or maybe not related in the way they think they are), you can test them both at Ancestry.com and save a lot of money vs 23andMe. 23andMe is $199 now and Ancestry is typically $99, but right now is on sale for $79 per kit. I don't think that price is going to last much longer, but Ancestry does have sales maybe 2 or 3 times a year.
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Jan 6, 2016 18:09
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On the topic of the idea that some people really preferring not to know if someone is their biological relative or not, I thought I'd mention the Paul Fronczak case. In 1964, a married couple, Chester and Dora Fronczak had a baby in a hospital in Chicago. A day after the baby (named Paul Fronczak) was born, he was stolen from the hospital by a woman who was posing as a nurse. No leads ever turned up, but two years later, a 2 year old boy was found abandoned in New Jersey. The police decided that maybe it was the kidnapped Fronczak baby and gave him to the Fronczaks. The Fronczaks apparently agreed that this could be their son, so they decided it was so and they raised him to adulthood. He didn't look anything like his parents as he aged, so of course he wondered if he could possibly be the real Paul Fronczak after all. A few years ago, he decided he would do a DNA test to find out, and his parents were extremely against it. If my recollection is correct, his father begged him not to do it and then threatened to never speak to him again if he went through with it. Paul did it anyway and found what he already knew, which is that he wasn't really Paul Fronczak. With the help of one of the other 23andMe regulars, CeCe Moore, he did find his birth family eventually, but there was more mystery there. Paul Fronczak (or the man who has grown up under that name) is actually one of a pair of twins named Jack and Jill. They went missing when they were 2 years old. Their parents apparently separated and each told their family that the twins were with the other parent. They meanwhile destroyed all photos of the twins. Nobody knows what happened to his sister, Jill, and Paul is still hoping to find her and the "real" Paul Fronczak. http://www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-mans-identity-revealed-50-year-old-mystery-solved http://abcnews.go.com/US/stolen-birth-paul-fronczak-closer-finding-blood-relatives/story?id=22888623
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Jan 6, 2016 19:07
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Tendai posted:Do people really get these and get all "Oh no I'm really part ____" about it? I just wanted it because I'm a big ol' history dork who does most of the genealogical work for my dad's family. (trying to go back and answer questions that I skipped earlier) Yes, absolutely. They fall into a couple of convenient categories that we see over and over again. 1) Unexpected Jewish Ancestry This group is generally the least upset about their surprise findings, but some can still get a little bent out of shape. A few do get really insane about it, but I suspect that those people are probably kind of nutty in general. This is not that uncommon a finding, given the history how most countries have treated Jewish people over the centuries. People converted or lied about it to avoid being persecuted, and then a generation or two or three later, nobody knows or remembers that that branch of the family was originally Jewish. I'd probably lie about my ethnicity too if I thought someone was going to murder me over it. Usually they'll say things like "but my father couldn't have been half Jewish, he went to church every Sunday and was an extremely devout <insert Christian denomination here>! How could he do that if he were really a Jew?" Well yeah, he didn't know either. It's not like he was holding secret Jewish rituals in his closet at midnight. Your father's grandfather converted when he emigrated from Eastern Europe to the US, and then never told his kids that he was born Jewish. He raised his family Christian, they raised their families Christian, etc. Not exactly a difficult thing to understand. People have a hard time separating religion from ethnicity, I think. A lot of the time what looks like confusing results are explained by a little bit of history. There's some "I can't be part Jewish, my entire family is Spanish and all Spanish people are super-Catholic!" This is true, but the reason that Spanish people are strongly Catholic is because for a while, your options were be Catholic or be executed. If you were Jewish, you either got the gently caress out of Spain or you converted to Catholicism, by law. If you converted and people weren't sure you were REALLY hardcore Catholic enough, the Spanish Inquisition paid you a visit to make sure you weren't retaining of your dirty old Jew ways. Then if you were, you could be executed, so everybody doubled down on the Catholicism, and that's how your genetically Jewish family ended up being the Pope's biggest fans 300 years later. There was a guy who got so upset about having some Jewish ancestry that he then went into every thread where someone found Jewish ancestry and told them that the test was a lie and that it showed EVERYONE as having Jewish ancestry. The company was run by Jews who had an agenda to get people to stop hating them by faking everyone's DNA results to make everyone at least a little bit Jewish. 23andMe's forums are a giant pile of poop and are impossible to search, but if I can find his exact words, I'll come back and post them here. 2) But my great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee Princess! This is the most plentiful group, and probably the angriest. There's a new thread made on 23andMe approximately once a week on this topic. Every loving white person in America is somehow convinced that they have Native American ancestry, and usually the story involves an ancestor who was a "Cherokee Princess." Even when the ancestor isn't a "princess," 90% of the time, the person is claiming that their ancestry is Cherokee. They never have any evidence other than "my dad told me it was true, are you calling my dad a liar?" Of course, their tests don't show any Native American, then they get all pissed off and claim that the DNA tests are a scam. Experienced users come in and ask them questions to determine why they think they have Native American ancestry. They tell them how to research their tree to find paper documentation of their Native American ancestor. The person usually claims that that's not necessary because they know that it's true. No other proof needed. Except the DNA test, which says otherwise. My in-laws are in this group, actually. Blonde, blue-eyed and pale, and determined that their great-great-grandmother was full-blooded Native. They didn't know her name or what tribe she was, but they were sure she was Native. I did the genealogical research for them and showed them that the paper records show that no, they're just white. The great-great-grandmother had a brother who was a white man that lived on a reservation for reasons that aren't documented, but even then, he's documented as being a white man on the reservation, which is probably how the family myth arose. They DNA tested, and the DNA test shows, of course, no Native American. They still claim they are. 3) Neo-Nazis Going to save this one for later, because it will involve copy/pasting some great quotes from 23andMe's forums and this post is already long. Mnemosyne fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 00:16
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Big Beef City posted:I got my dog a dna test and it said that he was part lhasa apso and chow mix because I marked 'mutt' on the form. The dog DNA tests are notoriously a bunch of crap.
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Jan 7, 2016 03:18
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Dr. Dogballs Jr. posted:is there any specificity for tribes/areas if you do come up as native american yet? like would algonquin vs. navajo show up as vague eastern vs vague western native or do they not have enough data? my siblings and i are supposed to be about 1/8th ojibwe this generation. it's nothing special this far down the line but my mother supposedly has documentation on it, it would just be neat to know how mutty we actually are No, though this is something that everyone (except the Native Americans) want. By and large, the Native Americans generally refuse to participate in DNA testing and large-scale studies of their tribes because they believe bad things could be done with it. I'm sure there are multiple concerns, but once you start figuring out who is what percent Native American, the government could start excluding certain people who didn't have enough Native DNA from being classified as Native and receiving benefits. Right now it's more based on if you are registered with the tribe and if the tribe considers you part of their tribe. But because we don't have much Native DNA tested, we don't have much to look at to sort out the difference between even Native folks from Canada vs Native folks from Mexico. As the price of testing comes down, I think we'll see more sequencing of old remains (of all races, not just Native Americans), and that will let us build a better understanding of the differences between tribes.
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Jan 7, 2016 03:23
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Rabbit Hill posted:Mnemosyne, how did you learn how to decipher this data (so I can learn too)? I just learned by reading and doing. The 23andMe forums have been the best place to learn, for the most part, but now that they're migrating to a new site, I don't know if that will continue, because so many of the old-timers are mad about the changes. Looking at the results you posted, your account has already been moved over to the new site. Anyway, read the posts, learn to recognize which of them actually knows what they're talking about and who is just talking out of their butts. Some people there have blogs, and those are useful too. (Warning, many of these blogs are ugly as sin) Blaine Bettinger (http://thegeneticgenealogist.com), CeCe Moore (http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com ), Shannon Christmas (http://throughthetreesblog.tumblr.com), Roberta Estes (http://dna-explained.com), Kitty Cooper (http://blog.kittycooper.com) and Kelly Wheaton (https://sites.google.com/site/wheatonsurname/beginners-guide-to-genetic-genealogy). Mostly it's been over the years through group efforts on the 23andMe forums. When I first tested 6 years ago, the product was still pretty new and almost none of us knew what we were doing. But people would post threads, asking a question, and a few people would look at it and make some guesses. Then others, myself included would say "Ok, how can we test this? How can we figure out if that's the right answer or not?" and we'd pool our resources and efforts to gather data that could help us figure it out. It's an ongoing process and we're all learning together. So is traditional paper genealogy not an option for your dad's side? It looks like you're familiar with researching, and I was under the impression that Italy had pretty decent records. I admit that I don't have any personal experience with Italian genealogy or records though, that's just off the top of my head. My best friend tested, as did her mother. The mother is 1/2 pure Italian as her mother was born in Italy. I know from dealing with her results that there aren't a ton of Italians represented in the database in general, and that her Italian matches were very low. That means I don't have a lot of pure Italian results to look at for comparison to see what's normal for Italians. I just pulled up the 1/2 Italian mother to look at her again. She actually shows about 10% Balkan, but since her father is an American mutt, I can't rule out that that's coming from his side. Anyway, your mother must have some DNA that's reading as Balkan, because if you look at Chromosome 6, you've got both copies of Chromosome 6 coming up as Balkan, and the region overlaps. You have one copy of each from each parent, so if both copies are showing Balkan, then it definitely came from your mother. Additionally, one of your X chromosomes is showing entirely Balkan. Your Dad's isn't, so that's not the X you got from him. So that's from your mom too. Because the X chromosome has specific inheritance patterns (always passes from mother to child regardless of gender of child, only passes from father to daughter, not to sons), you can sometimes tell a lot from the X. There are charts here that show the pattern of X chromosome inheritance (only the people colored in on the chart donate to your X chromosome): http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/2008/12/21/unlocking-the-genealogical-secrets-of-the-x-chromosome/ I personally download these and fill them in with my pedigree (only the colored blocks) so I can see which of my ancestors gave me my X chromosome. Then when I'm working with DNA matches who match me on the X, I know which ancestors are possible and which are not. I would assume that your mother's Balkan DNA is via one of her German ancestors. If you fill in that X chart for her, you should be able to see if her German ancestry falls on that X path. If you look at Europe on a map, Munich, Germany is only about 300 miles away from Slovenia, which is considered "Balkan." Three hundred miles isn't very far at all, so I would have to guess that some of that "Balkan" DNA is found around Germany. As Americans, we put a lot of emphasis on current political borders, which screws us up a lot. I think sometimes it's easier to put in perspective when you compare it to the United States; the distance between Germany and Slovenia is about as far as the distance from New York city to Maine. Los Angeles and San Francisco are farther apart than that. Another thing that obviously comes into play is that this is all still in its infancy. As more and more people get tested, we'll be able to refine our definitions of which DNA comes from which regions. I've also never seen the DNA of someone from Sicily (nor do I know really anything about Sicilian history), so it's also possible that Balkan shows up from that side of her ancestry? Now I'm going to have to go see if I can find some Ancestry comps from Sicilians because I'm curious.
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Jan 8, 2016 00:39
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RaceBannon posted:Mnemosyne, you have a wonderful way of explaining things. This is Something Awful, so I'm not sure if that's sarcasm or not. But if it's not, then thanks! EDIT: You seem to know what you're talking about with the DNA stuff; do you ever post over at 23andMe? Mnemosyne fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 02:17
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Gravitee posted:I'm thinking more along the lines of insurance companies getting a hold of data and charging more if you are going to be more susceptible to cancer, MS, etc. Or pharmaceutical companies targeting you with insulin ads because you are gonna get the beetus. There's already federal laws against this. It's called GINA (Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimination_Act
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Jan 9, 2016 04:31
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Yeah, it's just spit, but I often REALLY want to ask 23andMe how many kits they get back where someone filled the tube with some other bodily fluid. I'm sure some idiot has tried to bleed into it before. EDIT: Also, 0.2% is usually "noise," and 0.1% is basically always "noise."
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May 19, 2016 06:01
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Bastard Tetris posted:
FamilyTreeDNA's test kit is actually just a cheek swab. 23andMe has a cheek swab kit that they can send out upon request for special situations too. They refer to it as a no-spit kit, and it's for testing either the very young or the very old. Costs an additional $25 though. I got one to test my son, because he was like 5 months old at the time.
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May 19, 2016 17:56
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If this isn't appropriate, I'll remove it, but for anyone thinking of testing with Ancestry.com, you can get 10% off the purchase price by using my referral link, so it's ~$89 for the test there. http://refer.dna.ancestry.com/s/yzevg Full disclosure is that I then get a $10 Amazon gift credit.
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May 19, 2016 23:57
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