The Mrs. and I decided to do 23andMe for our anniversary this year, and just got our results back.
Most of my results were unsurprising, consistent with my past genealogy research: Vastly northern and western European. There was a smidge of Eastern Europe (2.5%) & a smidge of Balkan (2.5%) which reflected the one Slavic great-great grandparent I knew about. But to my delight, I also had a smidge of Ashkenazi (2.1%). Probably from that same otherwise Slavic ancestress.
My great and good college friends, who introduced me to the joys of Yiddish, Jewish cuisine, Passover Seders, and Allen Sherman recordings, have now also officially welcomed me to the tribe.
Meanwhile, tho the Mrs. also had Ashkenazi in her ancestry, it was < 0.1% and she seems in no hurry to embrace that heritage with a desire to learn to make kreplach. She was also surprised to find out that her vaunted family legend of 1/32 Cherokee status appears to have no basis in reality. Overall, she’s even more northern European than I.
Also notable, we both had miniscule < 0.1% traces of sub-Saharan ancestry.
Anyone else discover interesting stuff via gene analysis?
I also discovered that our family myth of Native American ancestry was bullshit. Supposedly, my grandfather’s very dark skin (for a white person) came from his mother who was part Native American.
It turns out that it was Sub-Saharan African ancestry – I’m 1/32nd SSA, and so my grandfather was 1/8th. This probably shouldn’t be so surprising – in the Deep South, black ancestry is probably pretty common among white people, and many would have tried to hide it with various explanations like the Native American myth.
I was pleased to find it out. Altogether I’m half Ashkenazi (not a surprise – my mother is 100% German/Russian Jew), 15/32nds Northern European (mostly English and Scottish), and 1/32nd Sub-Saharan African. I look like a generic, round-faced white guy.
Is 23andMe the one that also shows genetic predisposition? (Not that I’m asking you to share!)
I’ve been toying with the idea, even though I’ve done a lot of genealogical research and I’m fairly certain I’ll show up as 100% Northern European, unless they classify Germany separately.
My brother got this done recently and it came back 90% Ashkenazi, the rest was other Northern European. We expected a bigger mix, my mother’s family was Hungarian but she chose now to tell us her father’s family was originally from Germany. I’m thinking about seeing if my kids want to do this, they’ll definitely have a much broader mix including Irish, German, and Italian
I haven’t had this done but it might be fun. As far as I know I’m northern/cantral European. My earliest dated ancestors fled France following the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre. They went to Ireland for a generation, and in 1722 came to the US. On my dad’s side we’re German, starting in the early 1800’s.
Yeah, you get lots of traits and predisposition data too. Rather interesting, in its way.
Here’s how they break down the European DNA stuff. You get DNA %ages in each category and subcategory.
The general category of European gets broken down into 5 categories: Northwestern European, Southern European, Eastern European, Ashkenazi, and Broadly European.
Northwestern European then gets divided into 5 subcategories: French & German, British & Irish, Scandinavian, Finnish, and Broadly Northwestern European.
Southern European gets divided into 5 subcategories: Balkan, Sardinian, Italian, Iberian, and Broadly Southern European.
The other 3 categories do not get further subdivided.
Other categories include South Asian, East Asian & Native American, Subsaharan African, Middle Eastern & North African, Oceanen, and Unassigned. Many of those categories have their own subcategories too.
I must say I have always been a bit sceptical about these tests. How do they interpret results as meaning “ancestry of xyz, this percentage”. Humans beings move around a lot, and love to mate with each other and even if some types of gene is found more readily in some populations, it does not mean that others don’t have them
How can you say that the xyz% of genetics is from Ashkenazi Jews or Bantu peoples with such specificity.
Us too, unless it slipped in under the Asian category, which was about right for a great-great-great-grandmother. The preponderance of British, French, and Scandinavian ancestry didn’t surprise anybody. There was also a whole bunch of minor ancestry from damn near everywhere.
Certain sequences are pretty uncommon and mostly appear in specific populations. Some of these sequences can be assigned to particular ethnic groups with a greater than 90% confidence level. Other sequences have lesser, but still significant, confidence levels.
DNA sequencing is actually a very good way for looking back into one’s genetic past. However, in the 23andMe heredity analysis that was done here, it’s making statements about populations and probabilities. Definite for an individual? No. Likely? Quite.
However, its identification of a specific mutation in my genome was very on target. THAT was 100% accurate for certain.
Analysis of my Y chromosome (passed through the paternal line only) and my mitochondrial DNA (passed through the maternal line only) shows that both sides of my family probably lived in Doggerland, a place that doesn’t exist any more.
My DNA is 3.2% Neanderthal which puts me at the 99th percentile for people of European ancestry.
I am a fraction of one percent Native American, which tends to substantiate a family legend that one of my colonial-era New Hampshire ancestors married an Abenaki Indian. I haven’t been able to verify that story through my genealogical research.
I have a Slavic surname but my eastern European ancestry is only about 5%. That doesn’t surprise me much because my paternal ancestors considered themselves to be German despite the name and for many generations married women with distinctly German sounding names.
I’m 7% Scandinavian which surprises me because I have no known ancestor born in the Scandinavian countries and no obvious Scandinavian surnames in my family tree. I’m guessing I descend from Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles or the shores of the Baltic in northern Germany, the two places where most of my known ancestors lived.
My parents did this through Ancestry, and the results were a surprise to absolutely no one. Mom came back 88% British Isles and the rest mostly French or German, and Dad was 100% European Jew. Which means I don’t need to bother doing it, as I have no earthly reason to believe my parentage is in any doubt.
Mom has done a lot of research and traced one line back to the tenth century, I believe. I occasionally get calls about being a Daughter of the American Revolution and the possibility that a distant cousin was once part-owner of the New York Yankees.
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The weirdest one in mine (previous thread) was a trace amount of Melanesian. Since all of my ancestors were here by the late 18th century at the latest and to my knowledge none had layovers in Papua, and I can’t even imagine a guy from New Guinea swimming to Northern Ireland to play sheathe the shillelagh with one of my ancestresses my best hypothesis, if it’s real, is that perhaps I had an ancestor or a relative who was a sailor and fathered a child there and their descendant was tested and has a genetic sequence or two similar to my own.
Best part of the test is that it put me in touch with a very distant cousin I’d never otherwise have met who is actually doing a thesis on a particular sequence that we share. He’s tracking down everybody he can who are confirmed of this particular lineage. An odd part is that my particular branch of the family somehow went from being Jewish tailors and shoemakers in Heilbronn, Germany to an enormous clan of Alabama hillbillies within surprisingly few generations. (Such migrations and changes are fascinating to me: my paternal grandmother had an ancestor who was a “stay at home” gentleman pirate in Philadelphia with the lovely name Edmond du Chastel de Blangerval, and his great-great-grandchildren [her near ancestors] were Georgia pig farmers.)
Mine was predictably European, though with a slightly different mix than I thought.
My surprises were a trace amount of North African, which doesn’t seem too far out there, and more bizarrely a trace amount of Japanese. I can’t even picture a scenario where that would happen.
I doubt that I’d bother spending the money because I’m pretty sure how it’ll come back. Dad’s parents and Mom’s grandparents emigrated from Poland in the early 1900s. I’d expect that to be reflected as 100% - so why pay for something I already know?
I know there’s German and Scottish blood in my husband’s line, but his family had no interest in genealogy, to the point that his folks don’t even know when their people came to the US, so it must have been pretty far back. He doesn’t care, and my frugality wins again.
With results like that, it’s time to look at the confidence intervals for those particular sequences. At 50 and 60% confidence intervals, I’ve got a trace of sub-Saharan ancestry, but when I raise them to 80%, that trace vanishes, tho the Ashkenazi remains at that level.
23andMe does show the ethnic breakdown over on different confidence intervals. I don’t know if the other purveyers do so or not.
