DNA Testing

[WildBill]

I ran across an ad today for Ancestry DNA testing. My older brother spent years researching the genealogy of our family so I have a very good family tree.
I was curious if DNA testing would show me something else that I don't know about.
Does anyone of the forum have experience with this testing?

[Vol Texan]

WildBill,

I did it, and did find some things out.

In my instance, I did it specifically to confirm the existence (or non-existence) of a familial link with a new person.

I'll PM you later from my PC with more details - iPhone typing is too slow for this story.

[WildBill]

WildBill,

I did it, and did find some things out.

In my instance, I did it specifically to confirm the existence (or non-existence) of a familial link with a new person.

I'll PM you later from my PC with more details - iPhone typing is too slow for this story.

Thank you. I look forward to your email.

[puma guy]

I already know I'm one third Indian.

[WildBill]

I already know I'm one third Indian.

My brother found no Indian blood in our family history.
There was one ancestor for which he found only one record. It stated "killed by a Indian."
I was married to a Choctaw and she claimed I was the only white guy she ever met who didn't claim to be part Indian.

[Skiprr]

PM inbound....

[The Annoyed Man]

I ran across an ad today for Ancestry DNA testing. My older brother spent years researching the genealogy of our family so I have a very good family tree.
I was curious if DNA testing would show me something else that I don't know about.
Does anyone of the forum have experience with this testing?

My wife used their testing service a couple of years ago. As she was an adopted only child who never met her birth parents, she was trying to track down her birth mother to see if she's still alive, just to see if there were any inheritable medical issues she should be concerned about. In any case, the test genetic test confirmed that she is primarily of English stock, which may or may not be consistent with what we know about her birth-mother's maiden name. There were no surprises in the DNA test, but the ancestry.com trail ran cold and we found a woman who may have been her birth-mom, but that person had passed away at a relatively early age (some time in her 40s), of unknown causes. Kind of disconcerting.

My in-laws got my wife through a privately arranged adoption. What they told her was that they knew her birth-mother, whom they had been put in touch with her via a friend of theirs. The story is that her birth mother was a single woman, working as a waitress, and her birth father was a UCLA engineering student. She was adopted right at 8 months of age, and we assume that her birth-mom took care of her until then.

Anyway, the DNA test worked as advertised, but it didn't really tell us anything you can't tell just by looking at her fair skin, freckles, blue eyes, and her brownish auburn hair color.

[AF-Odin]

Wild Bill,

My sister got one of the tests for me. Again, it confirmed what we knew from family research, predominantly English with a little Irish, and Scandinavian thrown in--darn those Viking raiders. The wild outlier was a small trace of South Asian--British East India Company???? Somewhat interesting, but not quite as precise as the Ancestry DNA TV ads, no real differentiation between French and German for example, just lumped as Western European.

[Keith B]

My brother had it done. We already knew the English side from the 11th century AD and earlier House of Plantagenet for my Dad's linage. However, we believed it to be all Dutch/German on my Mother's side. Interestingly we found a slight Slavic linage in there as well. As best we can figure it had to have been during the 6th century AD when they migrated into southern Germany and Austria, before moving more east/north to predominately settle. I have been thinking about having mine done as well. I know for a fact we are both from the same Father/Mother, but would be interested to see if they actually come up with the exact same info for me on the test.

[JakeTheSnake]

23andMe performs more tests, including ansestry, health and traits.
Cost twice as much, but you get a lot more genetic info.

If interested, you can find a lot of good info on Familysearch.org.
I found a family tree that shows I'm related to Charlemagne and Lady Godiva!
Also found ancestors that came over on the second Mayflower voyage.

[Keith B]

I found a family tree that shows I'm related to Charlemagne and Lady Godiva!

At least it wasn't 'Lady GaGa'...

[Skiprr]

Anyway, the DNA test worked as advertised, but it didn't really tell us anything you can't tell just by looking at her fair skin, freckles, blue eyes, and her brownish auburn hair color.

Yeppers. I haven't been active in genealogy for a couple of years, but the subject of DNA testing for that purpose gets complex pretty quick, and that's why I shot WildBill a PM offering a telephone call for a quick overview and brief Q&A. I became involved in it in 2004 and dabbled quite a bit over the span of a decade.

There are three types of DNA testing done for genealogical purposes: yDNA (the male Y chromosome, passed down only in the patrilineal line), mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA: which isn't human DNA at all but that of the mitochondria, those little cells none of us can live without, that are passed down through the matrilineal line), and autosomal DNA: the 22 pairs of chromosomes--minus the X and Y sex chromosomes--that make up the human genome. This is sometimes abbreviated as atDNA, sometimes as auDNA.

Choosing what and who to test starts with defining "why." The autosomal testing has gained a lot of popularity over the past three or four years, and is making a nice revenue stream for companies like Ancestry.com (to my knowledge, there are five companies offering autosomal testing in any volume, and one of those is the Genographic Project, a genetic anthropology study funded mostly by National Geographic and IBM).

One of the reasons for the popularity is, I believe, that while autosomal results are extremely complicated to evaluate, the most (monetarily) successful companies doing it do not provide you with marker results to the gene level, but merely an attractive pie chart representing how those genes have combined over the generations to give you a fairly accurate breakdown of ethnicity--slash--anthropological diasporic regions of origin. They do this by using massive databases comparing known-genomic values (many of which stemmed from tests of endogamous populations by Dr. Spencer Wells that helped lead to the founding of the Genographic Project in 2005) to your values and arriving at mathematical probabilities about what matches and what doesn't.

The Ancestry.com test, for example (which I've taken), provides no access at all to the raw data resulting from your test, only the estimated ethnicity/anthropological breakdown, plus any presumed matches from others who have also taken their particular test and whose information is in their database. And that's one place it breaks down for people like The Annoyed Woman: recent relative matches are unique to each testing company (for the most part). If I take Family Tree DNA's autosomal test and TAM takes the one from Ancestry.com, we could be first cousins and never know because the data isn't translated from one company to another.

And because of the complexity of autosomal DNA (there are 22 of those chromosomes, remember, and Chromosome 1 contains some 2,800 genes, Chromosome 2 about 750, and so on; add to that the fact that genetic recombination when insemination occurs is not a clean 50/50 thing: it's more of a "one from the mother, two from the father, three from the mother" sort of thing and with certain dominant genes winning out over recessive ones), the matching of near-relationship accuracy diminishes very quickly. As you'd expect, confirmation of parent/child/sibling relationships is extremely accurate; first cousins is pretty good; when you get even to second cousins, additional genealogical paper trail information will be needed to corroborate the match, and you may need to identify additional individuals for DNA testing to help seal the deal. You get beyond a second-cousin relationship, testing of multiple family members will almost certainly be required.

And I say the latter because, as wonderful as the age of the internet has been to genealogy, it's also introduced huge amounts of erroneous information into the wild that amateur genealogists will find online, decide it's a match with their family tree (without rigorous evaluation of source material and application of the "genealogical proof standard"), copy it into their own GEDCOM as fact, only for their information to be subsequently discovered by another researcher...and then it becomes like the old pass-it-around-the-campfire game where a simple sentence becomes entirely something else once it's whispered from person to person a dozen times.

DNA is a genealogy fact-checker no one had available at the turn of the century, and for that use alone it has tremendous value to family researchers. That said, however, if the goal is to verify existing genealogical information, I'd recommend the first item on the shelf be yDNA testing.

I've already lost all readers and am typing like a maniac which I told myself I wouldn't do, so I'll try to offer a summary and then shut up.

The male Y chromosome passes down only from father to son, and has only one actual function that we know of, a switch of sorts: if present, the baby will a boy, and if not, a girl. Women will be able to intuitively verify this statement: most of the Y-DNA chromosome, as far as we know, is junk. In fact, that's how it's referred to, as "junk DNA." But it's highly valuable to genealogists because it's a strict patrilineal chromosome transfer--there's no recombination--and there are well over 100 sets of markers, or STRs, that have been defined and for which generalized mutation rates have been identified.

If you and a suspected second cousin have interwoven family trees on the patrilineal side and you want to confirm if you share a common male ancestor, yDNA can do that for you with a high degree of accuracy in genealogical timeframes, and offer an estimate of the probability as to the number of generations to that common ancestor. In my own case, I'm descended from Welsh Quakers who moved into North Carolina circa 1770. The family included four boys and, through paper-trail research, I found three likely male relatives descended from three of the brothers. We each had yDNA testing done with the result of incontrovertible proof that that those three brothers were siblings, that we had almost certainly verified that their father was our oldest known male ancestor, and that the fourth brother's descendants were also almost certainly interwoven with our own family trees. One of those research Eureka! moments that can have you shout out loud.

In its wisdom, nature allows mitochondrial cells to pass to an embryo only from the mother. The father's got no say in this matter. Each of us, whether male or female, inherited our mother's mitochondria. So now we're looking at the matrilineal line.

Again, good news and bad news. The good news is that we have genetic markers to evaluate for the strict matrilineal line, and the expansion of the number of identified markers keep refining the accuracy of the results. The bad news--for genealogists researching family-tree relevant timeframes--is that mtDNA mutates significantly more slowly than yDNA. Current state-of-the art full mtDNA testing panels can provide roughly a 50/50 probability of a match at five generations, or about 125 years. And 50/50 can be an indicator, but not proof. A complete match on the more common HVR1 and HVR2 panels, which I've taken, put the 50/50 chance of sharing a common maternal ancestor out to 28 generations. Not terribly helpful for genealogy--though it can disprove a suspected relationship if the marker values are off--but very valuable for anthropological timeframes.

In somewhat the same way as databases have developed in autosomal testing that allows Ancestry.com to give a predictive estimate about your ethnic/ancestral origins, both yDNA and mtDNA results have been categorized into what are called haplogroups (not to be confused with hoplophiles or hoplophobes, which is a whole nuther non-genetic 2A matter). Haplogroups share certain identifiable genetic markers and can be broadly used to estimate anthropological history. Further refining haplogroups are "clades" and "subclades."

Haplogroup nomenclature has changed multiple times over the past decade, and the level of detail has become such that, on the yDNA side, there are no longer subclade or sub-subclade naming, but only identification by the most detailed marker for which you match. For example, on my patrilineal side, I'm R-L151, which aligns with family oral tradition that we migrated to America circa 1730 from Wales.

Remains fascinating stuff to me, even though I'm no longer what I'd consider an "active" researcher.

[G26ster]

Never understood this DNA testing. How far back does it go? Whether you believe in Creation or Darwin, we're all from the same place (Middle East/Africa). I always looked at it as "comfort zones." That is, when a person says, "I'm English" for example, that's because that's all they know about their ancestry, from what they were told by family or by research. If they suddenly find out that their original ancestor in England immigrated there from, let's say, Poland, they don't all of a sudden say "Oh, I'm Polish." They usually stay in their comfort zone they've been happy with all of their life, and continue to say, "I'm English." In fact the Polish immigrant immigrated to Poland from somewhere else. It is a fact that we all originated in the same place, unless the human species began popping up out of the ground like vegetation on every single continent. Just MHO.