My younger sister convinced me to do one (Ancestor was the one) a few years agho. She had been checking our lineage and was getting road blocks. So I took one.
Seems she’s only my half sister. My mom apparently had an affair when my parents were temporarily separated.
My dad said years before he died that he didn’t believe sister was his daughter.
Mom is also dead.
So other brothers and sisters
Needless to say it was a shock to her, but I had a feeling it was going to happen so I wasn’t really surprised. Sister was!
But she tracked down her real father’s family (the father is dead). They took it well as apparently he was known for sleeping around.
And surprisingly she as able to find out our mother’s real parents (she was adopted).
I signed up for 23 and Me back in 2014, and over the years it has popped up some interesting results for both genealogy and health. It also answered a rather large question I had wondered about for a long time, something that I don’t think would’ve been otherwise answerable.
I haven’t been tested yet, but I consider it when I get frustrated trying to track ancestors who seemed determined to leave no trace. My reasons against are:
Money. I object to paying for a test which will increase Ancestry’s profits. (Especially without knowing exactly who they are selling this data to.) I feel they should be paying me.
Reliability. Health and ethnicity results are junk. Ancestry, for example, is deciding your ethic background based only on other people who have taken their test & their self-reported ethnicity.
Privacy. Less of a concern for old people, but I can’t believe young people take these tests. It is only a matter of time before insurance companies start using results to deny coverage or charge more. Companies will start using them to avoid hiring (or promoting) people with health profiles they don’t like. Law enforcement is already using the results & that use will expand, maybe to a point we aren’t comfortable with. At the personal level, a lot of families have been rocked by results bringing adoptions, affairs, etc to light. Perhaps most importantly, it eliminates privacy for other people – the sperm donor who was assured his identity would never be known to the child, for example.
Read the fine print. You’re essentially giving away your most personal data for a silly novelty. Today this probably is not going to cause a lot of pain, but at some point in a not-to-distant dystopian future people (and their descendants) who have used these tests may come to regret it severely. Regulation is virtually zero and genetics will become the next frontier for patents and identification. Big business will buy up your genetic information and do whatever they want with it. Governments won’t even need to buy it…
Personally, I’m not letting anyone have that without a warrant…and even then, we’ll see.
This seems pretty vague to me, a sort of anti-tech screed without specifics. Admittedly, any new process can be full of scary possibilities, but what exactly are you afraid of? Isn’t it also possible that once we get many multiples of current DNA-tested people tested that whole new worlds of knowledge, medical treatment, diagnoses, etc. will open up?
23andMe just looked at the data for those genes and determined they had low risk. Low risk is not zero risk. Them having the trait is evidence of nothing.
I’m not saying 23andMe is valuable, but your anecdote is basically worthless.
The type of test depends on the type of ancestry and how serious you are. If you’re looking specifically at paternal line, then Y-DNA is going to be your best bet. Might want to go ahead and pony up for big-Y test (which is the most granular Y test) if you’re really going to invest time in the paternal line. The most popular service for that AFAIK is ftdna.com. If you’re looking for living matches on either side, Ancestry.com can be pretty good.
You should know going into it that if you’re Anglo-American or especially African-American, it’s extremely hard to find information on people born before 1820 or so because of the scarcity of meaningful census data. Most of my research ends at that date, and I can’t break through the brick wall no matter what, because the knowledge wasn’t passed down, and records were either lost or simply never created in the first place.
You should also know that a lot of the user-created content on those sites is just people copying each other’s homework and guesswork with no real analysis. One time I thought I’d found a missing link using some privileged information and put it into one of my trees as a guess. Months later I found that information was misleading and incorrect, and I deleted it. But not until after a hundred people copied it and gave it a life of its own. My screwup has become the accepted truth on ancestry.com and there’s nothing I can do about it. Sorry everybody! I’m more careful now, but many people aren’t and never will be. Be suspicious of unsourced information that goes back before 1840 or so, especially with names like “John Brown.”
You should also know it’s extremely common to find secrets regarding paternity/parentage, whether in your immediate, extended, distant, or historical family. Didn’t affect my immediate family, but I wasn’t pleased to be in the middle of family controversies involving people I didn’t know that well.
The area of origin is a very blunt instrument, and they’re always improving there. Mostly accurate for me, but you do get weird results. For a while, one of the services had me at 1% Japanese. Even if you assumed the maximum of adventurous travel and promiscuous relations, it strains all historical credibility for me to have any Japanese ancestry in my DNA. That dropped off my report after a few years, so I guess they found a gene that they only found in a few Japanese respondents, and then found it in some other groups and decided it was just background noise.
One point of clarification. They are not doing it based on everyone who have taken their test. They are basing it on selected reference panels who (self-report) having four grandparents born in the area (or somesuch). It’s not perfect, but it is pretty accurate at a broader regional level. They hide the uncertainty margins away when they report more narrow regions, but if you have the scientific understanding to see what they are actually doing it’s a perfectly valid analysis of genetic ancestry based on principal component analysis or similar.
My results were very accurate and confirmed much of my families verbal history. I knew that my mom’s parents were from Mexico, but I always had some doubt as to whether or not her dad was “really” 100% indigenous peoples, turns out that was true. My dads side of the family always claimed Irish background, which turned out to be true but with a slight twist. Further back it goes to Scotland, which for some unknown reason I have always been fascinated with even before the test results.
It also confirmed the sister that my mom and dad had prior to getting married that my father never knew about. Mom and her sister kept that one a secret for 50 years and dad never found out about her. Mostly because mom knew he wouldn’t have believed that it was his child in the days before DNA testing. And it explained mom’s joke about him probably have kids out there that he didn’t know about.
Ahhh, that sounds a little more solid. Especially in the early days, many people commented about drastic changes in their ethnicity each time there was an update. Maybe they finally applied some science.
This is a very understandable position, but you need to be clear that if any of your family (close or distant) has ever submitted a sample for these tests, then parts of your DNA sequence are already out there for anyone to inspect. It’s not that hard to construct someone’s identity from public records and DNA matches from a few 3rd-4th cousins (assuming that information is available). And you probably have a lot of 4th-6th cousins who have already submitted on those sites.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that train more or less left the station before anyone fully thought it through.
And to be clear, their evaluation isn’t relying on their own sample data, they’re relying on genetic studies. For each health marker, you can drill down and see the studies that they use. (for example, for Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency they link to 11 different studies).
In any case, as you say, tendency is a far different thing from determinism.
My only living sibling (my sister) and her daughter did one of the tests and asked me to do it. Apparently if a male relative does the test more/different information can be obtained. Don’t know what information, so far I have refused.
My cousins found a 1/2 brother that shocked their immediate family to the core. He was older than them and their dad knew nothing about him despite their dad being the “neighbor boy down the road” and ended up marrying my aunt after she came back from schooling.
Apparently my aunt got pregnant in her very late teens, had the child and gave it up for adoption. Their wife/mother had already passed away so no information could be obtained from her. My other aunt (the only one still alive) remembers that one year her sister did not come home from school for Thanksgiving or Christmas which was very odd as she was only 2 hours away. Made sense now after the information came out. This happened in the early ‘50s. Ironically the guy has the same first name as the son she had with her husband.
This is what happened to my sister-in-law and it total fucked up her family dynamic. Her mother was naughty back in the 60’s and took the secret to her grave! I did a thread on this some time ago,
My test revealed pretty much what I expected. 92% German with a light mix of British and Irish.
As time went on the German percentage went down. So it is dependent to the pool of people that participate.
At this time, the police do not need a warrant to get a sample of your DNA. All they need is access to your trash (courts have ruled this is permissible) and with a few things you have touched, they have your DNA. The ACLU is fighting this but so far it has gone no where. Till a case such as this reaches the Supreme Court, there will be no definitive answer. I would also be the current SC would allow this kind of DNA testing to continue without any kind of warrant.
I guess I see the police having access to one’s genetic information as more good than bad. I’m not particularly interested in protecting any distant relatives of mine who have committed major felonies, and I think that it could help those distant relatives from false accusations if they’re innocent of the felonies they’ve been accused of.
Am I not understanding other potentially nefarious uses of DNA by the police?
I have shared this before; I’m an adoptee and received 23 and Me as a gift and it led to me finding my birth family (and finally learning why I look the way I do). I haven’t checked in there in a few years so who knows who else has come out of the woodwork.