They’re running a holiday special.
I’m considering buying two tests for my mom & I.
My dad passed in 2013. It’s too late to research that side of my ancestry.
Are any of his siblings alive? You could go that way.
My dad’s sister is still alive. I’ll see if she’ll do the test.
Thanks
My $0.02 is, leave Dad alone and let him believe what he wants to believe and know what he knows. There’s a thread about family secrets and I’m not saying Dad has any, but sometimes things are left unknown and unsaid. I’ve revealed some things to by siblings after my Mom passed away and it went well. But the secrets revealed when my Dad died caused a 20+ year rift and resentment of my family and that was only resolved because my Mom became seriously ill two years before she passed.
AFAIK, there are only 4 direct relatives (2 from Mom, 2 from Dad) left who could answer some questions we have about my parents. I’ll never ask and I hope my siblings never will so we can let those answers pass with them.
Thinking about my wife’s situation where there was a discrepancy because her ancestors lied about their country of origin, there’s also what Wikipedia calls “non-paternity events.” The percentages seem to vary and I’ve found different figures cultures/time periods/etc, but figure four percent of the males in given family tree, uh, don’t belong there. That kind of stuff adds up over time.
For a brief period after my mother died, I put a decent amount of time into my geneology and was always mildly frustrated knowing that even through the best efforts, by work was to some degree just a bunch of BS that got recorded for the sake of convenience.
There are also (presumably rarer) cases of maternal discrepancy, but I can’t find figures on that at the moment. This concept initially puzzled me, 'cause I’d think you’d know if you didn’t have a baby, but it encompasses cases like an accidental baby swap at the hospital, or things like raising someone else’s baby as your own due to the stigma of out-of-wedlock birth, etc. Rarer stuff, but it still happens.
I have more Neanderthal variants than 94% of customers.
So I got that going for me.
DNA testing works on statistically likely probabilities. As this article from Scientific America states:
“When it comes to ancestry, DNA is very good at determining close family relations such as siblings or parents, and dozens of stories are emerging that reunite or identify lost close family members (or indeed criminals). For deeper family roots, these tests do not really tell you where your ancestors came from. They say where DNA like yours can be found on Earth today. By inference, we are to assume that significant proportions of our deep family came from those places. But to say that you are 20 percent Irish, 4 percent Native American or 12 percent Scandinavian is fun, trivial and has very little scientific meaning. We all have thousands of ancestors, and our family trees become matted webs as we go back in time, which means that before long, our ancestors become everyone’s ancestors. Humankind is fascinatingly closely related, and DNA will tell you little about your culture, history and identity.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-accurate-are-online-dna-tests/
As always, what you don’t know or blindly accept as fact can come back to bite you!
I’m waiting for a test that will me which group of apes I came from! 
I heard that the results it gives you isn’t really your ancestry so much as finding where people with the same markers currently reside. It may have someone in Iceland, but that’s just because that person’s mother moved there from France when she was 40 and now DNA records show her as being in Iceland, but not necessarily in any way Icelandic.
I’m not sure if that’s strictly how it works, but if it is, the results can be misleading.
Do these sites ask you for your best guess as to your ancestry, when you submit the tests? Even given that a lot of people have no clue, and that a lot of people have a clue, but the clue is wrong, it seems to me that, statistically, they could vastly improve their database in that way. They don’t need to use a mere 1000 genomes (or whatever) as their reference sample, when they could use their entire customer base as a sample.
What I actually think is… if your Italian percentage is 1.5%, then his test should come back at 3%. This will disappoint his expectations if he thinks he’s any significant part Italian. If his test comes back at like 25% or higher, then congratulations, you probably have a paternity surprise somewhere uncomfortably close on your family tree.
My sincere advice… tell him that the company made a mistake and that the new results reflect exactly what he expected. Do not pester him to get a test and never mention it to him again.
The results can change over time. I did he Ancestry test, and the original results had some surprises: I had a 25% chuck of UK (England/Ireland/Scotland/Wales) as expected, but only 37% Chinese (I expected 50%), plus 12-13% of Central Asia and Iberian Peninsula. A few months ago they added more reference lines (supposedly they use individuals with well-documented lineage confined to a particular area for six generations) and re-analyzed my results. This time I came back 25% UK, 50% Chinese, and 25% Italian (ignoring/rounding out some trace amounts).
I also got a close (1st/2nd) cousin match with a very Italian last name, and have been in contact with a more distant (3rd-5th) cousin whose parents are both from the region in Italy that Ancestry estimates that some of my ancestors originated. I do not know who my maternal grandfather was, but I’m pretty sure now that he was Italian.
I’m pretty sure that my bi-racial ancestry confused Ancestry’s algorithm the first time around, but probably they added more Asian reference samples and that helped clarify things the second time around (I assume that they do some sort of best-fit of my DNA profile to the reference profiles and I got stuck in a local minimum the first time around).
My wife’s results were a different surprise, due to dilution. She has a well-documented paternal line back to a German immigrant who came to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s. His son took off for North Carolina and the family eventually ended up in Arkansas. My wife’s DNA has no trace of German in it at all - she has a German last name but almost 100% English/Scottish ancestry.
After being unable to track anything about our father and realizing everything he told us about his background was a lie, my brother had his DNA tested. Turns out he is 1/4 Russian and 1/4 Inuit. Since my mother’s background is pretty well established, that must be Daddy’s contribution.
Who knew?
Go to 23and me’s ancestry page, go down to the bottom and slide the
“Change confidence level” to “Conservative 90%” and I bet almost all of your results will change to “Broadly European”
These tests are highly biased based on their reference population, and are not as concrete as people believe.
Also note you are also almost certainly related to every European who was alive in the year 1000 which has living descendants. Europe is really really inbred and they are looking for small changes with limited data sets. While it can give you a notion of ancestry it is not a reliable test.
It makes money and may be more reliable than family stories if you get lucky but it is not even remotely reliable enough to destroy family relationships for almost all customers.
This page will also show how quickly DNA can “wash out”
https://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_statistics
Note while still in the “for entertainment only” FTDNA’s tests are a bit more accurate because they target ancestry but still are limited by the size of the dataset and the issues that people are horny, life is complicated and culture isn’t a genetic trait.
She blinded me with science!!
Family lore, passed down stories, etc. in many cases turn out to be just that…stories.
Yeah… Because that’s totally how it works… :smack:
There’s no reason to expect that. Aside from the reasons other people have mentioned (shared genes, travelling ancestors, inaccurate catalogs) we also have a problem because we don’t always inherit precisely 50% of their DNA from any parent. If you have Parent A and Parent B, your split might be 50/50, or it could be 25/75, or 99/1, or any other combination.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but in my experience (caveat caveat), whereas in the US we have a very distinct racial divide (with associated negative feelings), in Europe it seems to be expressed more as nationalistic divides. Rather than White vs. Black, etc., it is Italian vs. French vs. German vs. etc. So, questioning someone’s Italian identity would be like questioning someone’s White identity in the US.
Do midichlorians show up on genetic tests?
Here is a link from a charity called Sense about Science that focuses on trying to provide information about the misrepresentation of science and evidence in public life. Hopefully a non-IMHO source will help.
Ancestry tests are trying to give people a simple answers to a complex chain of events. The results are in no way definitive, but can help with understanding the entire story; when combined with other data. As an example. even if the results are 100% valid a French/British ancestor could have moved to Italy and fully integrated into the culture and while family histories are also unreliable their children may have felt as “Italian” as much as many of us feel “American”. Culture isn’t genetic.
The ethnicity estimates are wildly oversold by the companies, as they are what brings in customers.
I’ve had my DNA analyzed by all of the big ones for me, my father and paternal grandmother, and would not recommend anyone taking them to “find out ‘what’ they are”. The ethnicity estimates are overrated and discussion groups are full of confirmation bias, “They perfectly fit my expectations!” and unnecessary despair “I got no German, that must mean grandma cheated on grandpa!”
You can look at where your matches are located and get better information about where at least some of your ancestors came from, but you can’t compare those numbers, as having 10% of your non-US matches from Germany and only 5% from France may mean that testing is more popular in Germany, or just more popular with your German cousins.
What DNA can do is easily show paper trails in your immediate family correspond to who actually had babies with who. And with hard work it can also be used to discover links where paper trails don’t exist, or prove more distant paper trails, but the more distant the relationship, the bigger the chance that people are just doing confirmation bias with these tools as well.