And either charge their clients or write it off their income tax as a cost of doing business.
I did mine with two different companies.
Ancestry says:
39% Scandinavia
22% Great Britain
21% Italy/Greece
6% Ireland
4% Europe West
4% Europe East
3% Iberian Peninsula
<1% Finland/Northwest Russia
23andMe says:
99.9% European
0.1% Oceanian (this would be the indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand, and various Polynesian islands.
They go on to break down the European part:
49.3% French & German
21.4% British & Irish
3% Scandinavian
21.7% Broadly Northern European
1.7% Eastern European
2.5% Broadly European
It isn’t clear to me exactly how to compare the two. At first blush they seem to have a lot of disagreement.
I did this as much to discover relatives as to learn my global origin distribution. Both services identified many relatives that I could confirm through other means, so it’s clear they were testing me in particular. That is, in some ways they were definitely right.
Here’s a question: it’s not all that rare to have neither XX nor XY chromosomes. That is, something like a percent of people don’t fit neatly into either of the two chromosomal sexes. The great majority of these people are not aware of this, unless for some reason they learned through DNA testing. So, the companies who are selling these DNA services to people curious about their origins would be discovering by far more individuals who don’t fit neatly into either of the two chromosomal sexes, than have been discovered before. Are they telling them?
I would be suspicious of the 3 significant digits, and would completely disregard the 0.1% part. But it’s interesting how the two companies seemed to have disagreed on Scandinavian vs French/German.
Yes, it is. I paid for 23 & me, so I know they are right.
:rolleyes:
1% Eskimo?
1% Pygmy?
Close?
I didn’t rwaluze these tests gave you health info. That makes taking one a lot more appealing.
I haven’t been too interested because I’m Ashkenazi Jewish on both sides, so I’ll likely end up with 95%+ on that…but what if there IS a surprise? Did great-great granny screw some Watusi who happened to be passing through the shtetl?
Not sure they all do. 23andMe does. Somebody upthread commented that they were made to stop, which is true, but they fixed whatever the reason was, and now they do again. Also, some of the services give you a data set that you can upload to another site that translates them into known health issues. I did both of these, and learned that though I have little of interest, I do have one rare difference in how I metabolize certain drugs.
My family lore had that, your family lore had that, a lot of people claim that. I did find that a far-distant great uncle of mine was George Gist, a mixed Cherokee man most widely known as Sequoyah. Apparently I don’t share the Native part of his heritage, but I can see how people would get confused and be eager to claim a closer relation than actually exists.
The “Cherokee Princess” is rather popular in the SouthWest. John Smith(s) if he or they existed were probably drunkards who somehow stumbled into the family tree.
For those of you who haven’t kept up, both Mamaplant and Papaplant have a family story that someone in the family married an Indian named John Smith and was disowned. They wondered if they were the same guy.
Pay attention after this, there will be a test on Tuesday, multiple guess.
Yeah, the whole “Cherokee princess in the family tree” this has become such a motif that my spouse frequently ran into trouble with it - in his case, not only was his mother and half her siblings able to converse in the Cherokee language, but they had family photos, census records, and a host of other forms of documentation that his great-grandmother was, in fact, a full blood Eastern Band Cherokee.
Then again, no one was claiming she was a princess, either, or anyone special.
23 and Me results were:
European
98.2%
Northwestern European
89.4%
British & Irish
36.9%
French & German
19.7%
Scandinavian
3.8%
Broadly Northwestern European
29.0%
Southern European
4.5%
Iberian
1.2%
Balkan
0.8%
Broadly Southern European
2.5%
Broadly European
4.3%
East Asian & Native American
0.8%
Native American
0.4%
East Asian
0.3%
Yakut
0.2%
Broadly East Asian
< 0.1%
Broadly East Asian & Native American
0.2%
Sub-Saharan African
0.8%
West African
0.6%
Broadly Sub-Saharan African
0.1%
Middle Eastern & North African
0.1%
Broadly Middle Eastern & North African
0.1%
Unassigned
< 0.1%
Why did I do it? Seveal reasons. I am adopted and had no idea before. I have 2 biological children who wanted to know. Medical history/profile.
My Son doesn’t look at hids bio-dad as any kind of parent, so he wanted the scoop there too so he got the test as well. Interestingly enough, we have relatives from my birth family, about 300 3rd or 4th cousins. So even if I wanted to know something above and beyond what this told me, ain’t gonna happen.
In my case it’s because I am adopted with no records of my biological parents. I wanted to know what I might be susceptible to as I get older.
It seems to be popular all over. My grandmother always used to talk about her grandmother, who was supposed to be Cherokee. According to the census, her grandmother was mulatto. I know some Indians were marked M for mulatto in the census, but it’s much more likely that she was biracial and possibly conceived through unpleasant means*, which made the family decide to sanitize the story.
*Her descendants are black, so this wouldn’t be a case of someone trying to pass in order to rise higher in the American caste system that was in place back then.
My testing kit will arrive in a few days. I’ve always loved genealogy and genetics so it’s only natural to combine the two. Possibly connect with some distant relatives.
Since I had genealogy hobbyists on both sides of the family I have lots of documentation on where I came from. My sons, however, wanted to get theirs done because my late husband was, quite literally, a foundling, having been left anonomously as an infant in a Baptist church. We are awaiting the results.
If you’d like to continue on your cheap path, you can get a DNA kit from Ancestry.com for $80.
64% Native American
23% Southern European (either general or Iberian)
6% Undetermined
Pretty much what I expected from family histories. I’m somewhat disappointed that I have no Sephardic Jewish ancestry (some tempting family antedotes that maybe we were crypto-Jews), and it is frustrating they can’t break down Native American into distinct tribes–can even the most high priced tests do this? I am getting both my mother and one of my aunts tested, hopefully they can clear up the “undetermined part”.