Your DNA

I'm sorry @Murrmurr I thought your mom passed recently, but in the last few posts you talked about her as if she was in the present. Thought I was going nuts! Yes, please ask Bonnie, and thank her for paying attention! ;)
 
Several years ago I used 23andMe (I think it was a gift from my Mom, she was doing one at the same time). I remember being disappointed that my results didn't have any surprises, but I'm glad I did it because there is lots of interesting information. I had felt sad that my siblings and I had not done much reproducing, but after finding out how many zillions of cousins of various degrees litter the country, I feel better knowing that even though our little root has shriveled up, the plant's root system is huge and healthy all around us.

Per their report, I'm 100% European, 96.4% Northwestern Europe (mostly German and British), and 4.6% Eastern Europe.
I'm less than 2% neanderthal and have 291 neanderthal gene thingies but I don't have the genes for any of the known neanderthal traits (I am not fearless about heights, not extra sweaty during exercise, not sneezing at dark chocolate, and something else I forget).

This is my maternal haplo-thingie:
"Your maternal line stems from a branch of haplogroup J called J1c2. Haplogroup J1c2 is a relatively young haplogroup that traces back to a woman who lived nearly 10,000 years ago. Her ancestors migrated into Europe from the Middle East as the Ice Age receded between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago." "J1c2 is frequent among 23andMe customers...1 in 200 23andMe customers share your haplogroup assignment."

I don't think I need to worry about being in a DNA database, I haven't left any DNA behind at my crime scenes, ha ha. Also, I watched a YouTube where even though the murderer had not put their DNA in any database, the DNA from the crime was analyzed against the DNA databases and just from various relatives having done DNA tests the investigators could narrow down that the murderer was one of 4 brothers from a particular family (and then I think they used traditional crime techniques to figure out which specific brother).
 
I haven't done this yet, but I did do enough research on Ancestry to know that my ancestors were German Jews who immigrated to the states, changed their last name to something that is a weird variation of a Jewish last name and became devout Baptists. Even my father's first name was a butchered Jewish name. They weren't very creative. I could have figured this out without Ancestry. One of my Jewish friends once pegged me by my last name and said, "your family got out".

Perhaps that is why I am Agnostic.
 
Not to hijack this thread in any way but why are people so interested in their ancestry that they would compromise their privacy by submitting DNA to strangers? (Doctors and hospitals don't count, OK.) :unsure:
 
chic said:
Not to hijack this thread in any way but why are people so interested in their ancestry that they would compromise their privacy by submitting DNA to strangers?
Click to expand...
What risks do you see in doing that? I know there is a lot of worrying about it, however there are benefits too.

We have a long history of concerns and changing attitudes towards our privacy. Once people were concerned that photography, especially of people's faces would reduce our privacy. In reality it did, but it also brought benefits. Few people worry about their pictures appearing on driver's licenses and passports today.

The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images
 
dseag2 said:
I haven't done this yet, but I did do enough research on Ancestry to know that my ancestors were German Jews who immigrated to the states, changed their last name to something that is a weird variation of a Jewish last name and became devout Baptists. Even my father's first name was a butchered Jewish name. They weren't very creative. I could have figured this out without Ancestry. One of my Jewish friends once pegged me by my last name and said, "your family got out".

Perhaps that is why I am Agnostic.
Click to expand...
Last names were often anglicized not by the immigrants themselves, but by the workers at port of entry. Lantzman!
 
Pepper said:
Last names were often anglicized not by the immigrants themselves
Click to expand...
And by marriage.

My cousin is married to a Jewish woman, I got an invitation to a Bar Mitzvah for Chris Jones a few years ago, their son. Sure doesn't sound Jewish to me, LOL. I believe he is a practicing Jew.

And my father's last wife was Jewish and she took his Irish name. They however had no children so did not pass it on.
 
I used 23 and me about 5 or 6 years ago. Have not checked the latest results. Also, had my SO checked, since we both grew up in the same little village, and I wanted to make sure we weren't related. :p

No surprises - English/Irish/German/Scottish. 3% Neanderthal. I have had a couple of folks, distant cousins, who contacted me via email, but I usually just ignore them.
 
Alligatorob said:
What risks do you see in doing that? I know there is a lot of worrying about it, however there are benefits too.

We have a long history of concerns and changing attitudes towards our privacy. Once people were concerned that photography, especially of people's faces would reduce our privacy. In reality it did, but it also brought benefits. Few people worry about their pictures appearing on driver's licenses and passports today.

The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images
Click to expand...
The risk is unwanted agencies acquiring a person's most private information in return for more or less worthless information such as you are 20% this and 35% that nationality which is all pretty useless considering what is being surrendered.
 
My son was being harangued by a man in a different state that he was his brother, as his mother told him since birth his father was my husband. After eight years of this, my son took a DNA test with 23 & Me as that was the one this man used. That is where I got the information on myself. My son has no brother and this 44 year old nightmare was over for me.

This man got the haranguing gene from his mother who never left us alone. Bitch. I'd love to tell her off but my friends won't let me! They are right of course, it's over.
 
Alligatorob said:
What risks do you see in doing that? I know there is a lot of worrying about it, however there are benefits too.

We have a long history of concerns and changing attitudes towards our privacy. Once people were concerned that photography, especially of people's faces would reduce our privacy. In reality it did, but it also brought benefits. Few people worry about their pictures appearing on driver's licenses and passports today.

The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images
Click to expand...
While I totally agree with you re: privacy and don't think any information is private anymore, the risk is that China seems to be tracking DNA from Americans to develop the World's largest bio-database per the following article, so in a sense @chic is correct. I also saw a similar story on 60 Minutes. As much as that show depresses me, I think it is fairly balanced so I watch it to see what we are not hearing in the news.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/us/politics/china-genetic-data-collection.html
 
dseag2 said:
While I totally agree with you re: privacy and don't think any information is private anymore, the risk is that China seems to be tracking DNA from Americans to develop the World's largest bio-database per the following article, so in a sense @chic is correct. I also saw a similar story on 60 Minutes. As much as that show depresses me, I think it is fairly balanced so I watch it to see what we are not hearing in the news.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/us/politics/china-genetic-data-collection.html
Click to expand...
#1 Yay, I'm right about something. šŸ˜Š

#2 That is a worst case scenario and shows what can happen when a person voluntarily shares info they would be wiser to keep to themselves considering the payoff here and what we have all experienced for the past two years and counting. :unsure:
 
I had mine done before I started hearing about how our DNA could be misused. What I found interesting about this is that under Europe, Germany is not mentioned. At one of our family reunions, we were told that the first non African ancestor traced back to was (unfortunately) a German slave trader.
DNA Croppped Pg 1.jpeg

DNA Cropped Pg 3.jpeg
 
Pepper said:
I guess it was a family legend.
Click to expand...
I don't know Pepper. We have two family historians researching our family history and the information was passed down to our unofficial family historian, one of our matriarchs who spearheaded the reunions. One historian made a DVD that was distributed at a subsequent reunion but I never finished watching it (my ADD couldn't handle all the detail at that time). When I find it again, I do want to watch it in its entirety to see if the German ancestor is mentioned. I think my middle grandson would be very interested so it would be nice to watch it with him.
 
Webp.net-resizeimage-20.jpg
 
hollydolly said:
I know I'm a Celt born and bred, to Celtic parents and grandparents for as far back as I've managed to find to be the 14th century..
Click to expand...
I watched a Great Lectures series on the Celts recently and one thing they said was that recent DNA studies have shown that Celts are not all genetically related. Apparently the Celtic ethnicity is more cultural than genetic. Celtic religion, art, and practices spread widely but the genes not so much.

What is left today is just what they called the "Celtic fringe", just the remnants of what was once a much larger area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_nations

I am sure you are a Celt, and I think much of my ancestor was Celtic also. However my understand of what a Celt is has changed. It is a very interesting story. To quote Wikipedia:

A Y-DNA study by an Oxford University research team in 2006 claimed that the majority of Britons, including many of the English, are descended from a group of tribes which arrived from Iberia around 5000 BC, before the spread of Celtic culture into western Europe. However, three major later genetic studies have largely invalidated these claims, instead showing that haplogroup R1b in western Europe, most common in traditionally Celtic-speaking areas of Atlantic Europe like Ireland and Brittany, would have largely expanded in massive migrations from the Indo-European homeland, the Yamnaya culture in the Ponticā€“Caspian steppe, during the Bronze Age along with carriers of Indo-European languages like proto-Celtic. Unlike previous studies, large sections of autosomal DNA were analyzed in addition to paternal Y-DNA markers. They detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic or Mesolithic Europeans, and which would have been introduced into Europe with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as the Indo-European languages. This genetic component, labelled as "Yamnaya" in the studies, then mixed to varying degrees with earlier Mesolithic hunter-gatherer or Neolithic farmer populations already existing in western Europe. Furthermore, a 2016 study also found that Bronze Age remains from Rathlin Island in Ireland dating to over 4,000 years ago were most genetically similar to modern Irish, Scottish and Welsh, and that the core of the genome of insular Celtic populations was established by this time.

In 2015 a genetic study of the United Kingdom showed that there is no unified 'Celtic' genetic identity compared to 'non-Celtic' areas. The 'Celtic' areas of the United Kingdom (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Cornwall) show the most genetic differences among each other. The data shows that Scottish and Cornish populations share greater genetic similarity with the English than they do with other 'Celtic' populations, with the Cornish in particular being genetically much closer to other English groups than they are to the Welsh or the Scots.

This is the course I listened to. Got it through an Amazon subscription for a whole lot less than buying it would be. The Celtic World
 

Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top