This is a good username/post combo.
Really, with the “minor nobility” factor, one part of my family grapevine wended from the New World back to Bavaria, from Bavaria to Alsace, from Alsace to Burgundy, from Burgundy to Sicily, with a brief stay in Denmark then back to Holland for a bit, then from Holland to England, then back to northern France. So from the early 1100s, that one vine sort of wanders around a bit. I can see picking up some north african in Sicily from the moorish invasion. If we were peasant scum we would have stuck in an area before moving to the US. Mom’s sice is the peasant scum side, anabaptist farmers in Germany headed over in the mid 1600s to the new world and sort of milled about farming in a few places and interbreeding with themselves until Mom rumspringa’d out to get a job in WW2 and ended up meeting my dad in college.
The whole field is fascinating but I don’t see the point in doing it since I am going to be entirely Ashkenazi too. (Although it would be an interesting conversation with Mom if I end up half Irish or something). Do you end up with anything more interesting to make it worthwhile? It should be mostly Polish/Ukrainian with maybe a dash of Georgian/Turkish on Dad’s side.
There is so much data on Ashkenazi Jews that it makes the analysis really interesting. My husband, not Jewish, had much less detail in certain areas. Plus, there are a ton of ‘DNA relatives’ to interact with.
I was adopted, and the agency lied to my parents, said I had my dad’s ancestry (Irish/Anglo), my sister my mom’s (French). Turned out when I met my birth mother she said I was Swedish (biol. father)/Slovenian (her).
Yeah, I did 23andMe as well. Pretty neat info. I got a kit for my mom for her birthday. Notable results:
-
Mom has always claimed she was my mother. I was naturally…suspicious.
But I guess her story checks out, 23andMe did tag her as my mother -
The random genetic relatives that pop up were pretty neat. Looking up a few of them on facebook - there’s one guy that I’m like a 3rd cousin to, but who looks exactly like me. Eerie.
-
I’ve got a higher-than-average genetic risk for lung cancer, but I’ve got a lower-than average risk for going bald. I’m counting this as a win.
-
I’m 2.8% Neanderthal. Good to know.
-
23andme told me I have a pretty high chance of having of having brown hair. I rushed to the mirror to check - thank God, they were correct.
…though I did start to go gray in my early 20s.
Go with 23andMe. The health results were both eye-opening and a relief. I now know which tests I should never put off and which ones I should still get regularly but not worry myself sick over.
Until someone submits a sample to two independent labs and gets identical results, I think it would be wise to suspend judgement as to the accuracy of single results. Confirmation bias is a powerful force, and you might not be who you think you are.
They probably aren’t “fairly recent” cousins. Populations such as Ashkenazi Jews are so inbred that chances are that 4th cousin is at least an 8th, 9th cousin or more.
The Ancestry test is crap. No health results and the genetic ethnicity is nowhere near as complete as the 23andMe test.
At 23andMe, everything is included for the $99.
The question is how accurate are those ‘health results’. Have there been sufficient studies conducted of many many thousands of people’s genetic codes and compared them to their, and their family’s health over the course of several decades?
No? The devil you say!
Likewise.
It looks like a couple weeks later and the ability of 23andme.com to offer new health results has been suspended by the FDA:
My Genographic project results have been stuck at 80% complete for 3 weeks now. Had been hoping it would be completed by Christmas.