Lo and behold, surprise surprise.

I'm 100% European. :D

I was hoping for more diversity than that. 31.2% of me is British and Irish.

Happily, I can now confirm that I have the Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA passed down from my Jewish ancestors. (I'm in the 20% group identified below.)

It's fascinating that 23 and Me can identify where we came from in a vial of spittle.

"About 1.7 million Ashkenazi Jews living today (nearly 20% of the population) share a single branch of the K haplogroup, K1a1b1a. The diversity of that haplogroup suggests that it arose in the Middle East between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, and that everyone who shares it today could descend from a woman who lived as recently as 700 years ago. A similar pattern in two other K branches, K1a9 and K2a2, as well as the N1b branch of haplogroup N, has led researchers to conclude that 40% of the Ashkenazim living today – about 3.4 million people – could descend from as few as four women who lived within the last 2,000 years."

Wow, that is really cool. I have been wanting to do one of those DNA test but I just do not have the finances to do it just yet but maybe one day in the next couple of years, I can do it.

I've been putting mine off for a long time (for the same reason.)

Finally this year I treated myself as a Mother's Day gift to me. :)

23 and Me ran a special for Father's and Mother's Day @ 20% off. So I splurged a little more than usual.

It parlays with my genealogy so am not super surprised. Was very curious if I had the Ashkenazi strain, because only 20-40% of Ashkenazi apparently do. So that was a nice surprise.

I'm going to give my husband the gift of DNA knowledge. I'm being a bit selfish, because i'm dying of curiosity.

How is it that he's Dutch, Norwegian, English, And German, but looks like he crossed the Mexican border yesterday? I'm suspecting that he may be Melugian or Black Dutch ancestry. The relatives aren't talking. I'm so curious it's driving me crazy. He doesn't seem to care a bit which also drives me crazy.
Myself, I'm just boring European for the most part. Nothing fancy or even that interesting.

Inquiring minds want to know!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2017 11:57PM by janis.

Intriguing! (I'd be curious too.) :)

As for your own, there may be something there you had no idea. Like the Ancestry commercials where the woman learned she was 26% Native American Indian.

My SIL is hoping she'll find out she's part black when she gets hers done. But then that may have something to do with the fact she and my brother adopted 7 children of a bi-racial couple.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2017 12:15AM by Amyjo.

When I am able to afford doing something like this, I am interested in seeing how much Eastern and Central European I really have. I have noticed that since I have started working on my biological father's side, I have a lot of family from the Poland area and I also have some family from the Slovakia area as well.

I grew up being told by my parents that I was Scottish. As I built my family tree generations back, using Ancestry.com, everything was coming up French. I was stunned. So to confirm, I did the DNA test from both Ancestry and 23 and Me and confirmed it...70% French, just under 30% Irish. What?!! And, to boot,they found a famous DNA ancestor match, none other than the infamous Marie Antoinette. I learned that her DNA was obtained from the hair they cut off just prior to her beheading. Not sure how I feel about this. So, 0% Scottish, and like, trace English...something like .01%. Just weird. With all of the family history research I did while TBM, I didn't find out my true ancestry until long after I left.

My mother spent every Sunday afternoon working on family history.
She told me a mountain of things that weren't true. I don't know if she was intentionally lying, or if it was just her perception. She's not quite all there and hasn't been for a very long time.

She told all of her kids (6) that we were the end of the line for our last name. Not hardly. Not even close.

When the Google showed up the first thing I Googled was my maiden name. OMG! There are hundreds of them in the U.S.A. There are 1000's of them or variations in Scotland. Yeah, my maiden name isn't even close to dying out. I kinda suspected that when a lady with my same last name became a famous singer.

It's pretty easy to get way off course in geneology if you're not careful. One wrong ancestor and you're wronger and wronger the further back you go.

I expected to be mostly German. My mom's side of the family were the most recent arrivals to America from there.

I was surprised to discover I am 49% British, 20 something % Irish, 12 percent Scandinavian, THEN other European, and a bunch of trace things.

Zero Native American, which was one of the family stories.

My piechart shows I'm French & German 11.1%. Scandinavian 2.9%. British & Irish 31.2%. (Note I have Welsh and Scottish ancestry from the UK as well, but apparently that was not detected in my DNA, unless the other two ie, Britain and Ireland cover those countries as well.)

Broadly Northwestern European 37.6%. (Could this be where my Welsh and Scottish are embedded? LOL)

Then Ashkenazi Jewish 11.4%.

With traces of Southern European, Eastern European, then last it says I'm 4.9% Broadly European.

I didn't know until reading those results that for anyone who has Ashkenazi in their DNA, are very likely to be related as cousins however distantly to all others with Ashkenazi DNA. Whew. I knew we're all related somehow even without knowing this.

Such as most of Europe can trace their roots back to Charlemagne. Many to William the Conqueror, etc.

Okay, so I have 0.1% Native American! Vewy intewesting!

One of my cousins, now deceased, learned through his genealogy he's descended from Pocahontas. Now I shall need to explore that further as to where mine might be from.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2017 07:09AM by Amyjo.

I am leary of any test assigning a country.

I did the testing of my son many years ago as part of the National Geographic effort to map human migration.

On his mother's side, he was group B. Native American. No suprise. We knew that. But they did not assign a country. Kind of hard when it is one of the 4 major groups for Native Americans stretching from the tip of Argentina to Alaska.

What it could not tell him was where and when his native line blended with European settlers. That came from family history.

On my side he was group R. A common group from England and northern europe. But again no assignment of country.

I would assume they'd assign Britain. But.... our ancestors left Britain 500 years ago to colonize the current eastern US. wouldn't that make us Americans? The same for the Dutch thst were original colonists of New Amsterdam or as we know it New York. 500 years or so of their descendants residing on this continent. Are they not Americans?

How does one define British? After the Norman invasion of 1099? After the Viking invasions 200 years before that? Or after the Romans left 500 years before the Vikings?

My point is people migrate. Countries change borders. Empires grow and collapse. At what point do we say we are of one country or another?

The National Geographic site can show the migration of your groups. When and where they believe each group migrated from.

Exactly! I have some ancestors from an area in Europe which could be Dutch, French, German, Austrian, Swiss, or Prussian, depending on which era of history you're looking at. I haven't paid too much attention to that branch of the family, but I am going to have to map geography against timeline to try to figure out what ethnicity we are. Any one of those nationalities could also be Jewish and this branch could explain my complexion which is olive skin, tans easily, but green eyes and light hair.

I have not done the DNA test yet, because I need my dad to do it, but for this particular branch, it's on my mom's side so my own DNA test would help pin that down sort of.

I just want to know how much of my DNA is neanderthal.

4% of mine is supposedly Neanderthal. I believe that may be where my "Other European" comes from on the pie chart, as it explained "Other European" typified those who migrated to Europe 10,000 years ago, after an Ice Age melted on the European continent.

They just meandered on over from the Asian countries, and that's how Europe got its start. :)

Can I do one of these tests from China?

I don't see why not. You do need to buy the kit, and then mail your saliva sample to where it goes for processing. Other than the international postage involved, not sure if you'd run into some restrictions because you're in China?

I am 100 percent American and care not about my Neanderthal ancestors.

More Israelite DNA than the "Lamanites" -- congratulations!

I want to do one of these tests.

Take that Joey and Briggy!

It's the real deal, not hooey phooey. :)

The Dahm identical triplets did the DNA test thing and the results weren't identical.

http://www.ninjajournalist.com/entertainment/identical-triplets-dna-test/

The conclusion was that the various DNA testing programs are unreliable and the results should be taken with a grain of salt, much the same for the Ouija board, Taro cards, reading tea leafs, etc.

It's good for entertainment purposes only, i.e., don't take the results to the bank for a loan.

I used ancestry dot com for my DNA test about a year or so after my daughter. We found a lot of third and fourth cousins on my mother's side. And found a grown adult who was adopted as a baby.We are all united now, 47 years later.

The odd part, the man's name on my birth certificate is still bothering me as my ancestry was mostly Western European, plus the Irish, English and Scottish, and Scandinavian, etc.but the relatives listed that had their DNA done seem to be all on my mother's side, not my bio father's side.

That begs the question: Why? None of them did their DNA with ancestry dot com, or... he is not my bio father.
I finally saw a photo of him when he was under 20, and I was in my 50's. He looks like me in my 20's, so I'm not sure what to think anymore. Everyone that would know anything is long dead.
I'll keep looking for my bio father's family on ancestry and see if any show up. Found many of them -- still in Massachusetts and one cousin in CA.
The search goes on.

SusieQ,

What I've been learning is when you do your DNA test, it only traces the mother's side. Not the father's.

Likewise, if your sons, brothers, dad, etc. were to do theirs it trace back on a different genome strain the Y chromosome that women don't share.

Your dad's and brothers would be a different outcome than you or your sisters, in other words.

As it says on my DNA report, "The paternal haplogroup is a property of the Y chromosome, which only males possess, so females do not have a paternal haplogroup."

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> SusieQ,
>


Now I need to read the report again! I don't recall reading that on ancestry dot com....
took awhile but I found this:

..."Unlike some other DNA tests, which only analyze the Y-chromosome (and can only be taken by a male to look at your direct paternal lineage) or mitochondrial DNA (can be taken by a male or female but only looks at your direct maternal lineage), AncestryDNA looks at a person’s entire genome at over 700,000 locations."
What does ‘autosomal’ DNA testing mean?
Autosomal DNA testing includes the other 22 pairs of chromosomes that aren’t the X or Y chromosome that determine your gender. Autosomal testing allows you to find family across all lines in your family tree. That means both men and women can take the test, and the results are not limited to just the direct maternal or paternal lines.....

The AncestryDNA test analyzes your entire genome—all 23 pairs of chromosomes—as opposed to only looking at the Y-chromosome or mitochondrial DNA (which makes other types of tests gender specific). Your autosomal chromosomes carry genetic information from both your parents that’s passed down through the generations.
Using autosomal testing, AncestryDNA surveys over 700,000 locations in your DNA, all with a simple saliva sample.
"

That is why I thought my bio father family would show up.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2017 08:41PM by SusieQ#1.

An example of this SusieQ, is my uncle on my mother's side did his DNA w/23 and Me. He reported he is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, but there was nothing that showed up in his DNA because he isn't female. ETA: he does have the Ashkenazi in his DNA, according to 23 and Me. It shows he has 30% to my 11.4%. We both have the common Native American ancestor as well. My cousin who descended from Pocahontas is from my father's side. So this is indeed a mystery to me now, who that might be.

Nor will his daughters have that DNA because it's mitochondrial. It is passed down via the mothers.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2017 04:55PM by Amyjo.

Ahh...yes, I can see how there can be confusion.
I have "stories" and "comments" still in my memory that make me wonder if the man's name on my birth certificate is my bio father. Interesting situation. Nothing is proved one way or another.
Even if I had his blood type, for instance, I could rule him out but not rule him in.
So, I'm left wondering.
IF... some of the Swallow family show up on my DNA line, that will solve it. I'm still looking.

(Don't have any Native American, nor African, nor Jewish that showed up in my DNA. It appears that 23 and me might do things a little differently than ancestry does.)

I tried Ancestry DNA because I come from a huge family and was told I should have French in me. So to clear up some stuff, I did it and found out I was 100% Southeast Asian.

Did you have any Neanderthal in your DNA pointed out? While it is fairly common, does that mean it's common among the SE Asian population?

Just curious. I've been thinking of having the DNA test done for my wife.... Does it only say "southeast Asian" or is it more specific than that (Burmese, Thai, Hmong, Vietnamese) etc?

I found out that I'm about a third Irish and only seven percent British, though my last name is British. Irish is my biggest group.

I believe it's Ancestry that pinpoints more of these European countries?

23 and Me generalizes them. Such as my 32.1% British and Irish encompass all of the UK and Ireland. So that's inclusive of my Welsh and Scottish heritage.

While Ancestry would maybe tell me more about the breakdown between those groups ... judging by the commercials anyway.

Per 23 & me, I have one Neanderthal variant passed down to me from my forebears. "Trait: Less likely to sneeze after eating dark chocolate."

I'd just like to know how on earth would this have been known during the Neanderthal Age?

Neanderthals originate from Neander Valley, Germany 200,000 years ago! Eventually Neanderthals and Humans converged, "Around 60,000 years ago, modern humans started to explore beyond Africa, encountering and interbreeding with their Neanderthal neighbors. Skeletal remains found in the Manot Cave in Israel and elsewhere suggest that these two groups likely interbred in the Middle East or Europe."

A caution with these reports. The putative percentages of contributions between populations as similar as Northwest Europe countries are very crude and perhaps fundamentally indeterminate at that ultrafine granularity. No two companies will be close to agreement on your mix and all of them adjust their statistical models, sometimes wildly changing their own assignments. Here are a few items from my own journey in consumer DNAdom.

I've had equivalent tests run from four Big Name companies. This is obviously a significant interest of mine, given the money and time I have and continue to invest in it. The "raw data" from all of them agree on the residues for the SNPs that I can cross compare. So, all of these companies have the same repeatable, presumably accurate data to work from. They vary as to the set of SNPs, but the majority are shared by at least two outfits, many by all of them. Here are some tidbits from their analyses.

I have been pegged as low as 17% and as high as 78% "Scandinavian". One outfit adjusted that contribution by a 45% delta after they "recalibrated" their analysis algorithms.

I have been pegged at 1.2% and 2.9% Neanderthal. The former, according to that outfit, placing me 15th percentile for those of European ancestry, the latter at 85th. They can't remotely agree how much of me is non-sapiens and yet claim to tease out Lowland Scot from Ulsterman, Norwegian from Dane separated by 20 miles of water?

Curiously, the one thing all of them agree on is 2% sub-Saharan African. Where varies, but they all agree on it, and, further, that most of those alleles are on Ch 18. I have a line of family from the Deep South, so this result is not surprising. Brian Sykes, in his book DNA USA, discovered essentially all "white" people in the South have African and sometimes Native American contributions.

I could go on but this gets the idea across: take your report with boxes of salt.

As for me, I love love love that I live in a place and time where, crude as this new field is, it is available to a regular Joe. It's a hell of a story that's getting sorted out. We live in an era of molecular biology, exoplanets and other mind-bending things being real and knowable. How goddam cool is that?

Final me factoids: mt U5a1f1a1, terminal Y R-A410, both of course subject to change in a field that's moving along at, like, .7c.

Void K. Packer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Curiously, the one thing all of them agree on is
> 2% sub-Saharan African. Where varies, but they all
> agree on it, and, further, that most of those
> alleles are on Ch 18. I have a line of family from
> the Deep South, so this result is not surprising.
> Brian Sykes, in his book DNA USA, discovered
> essentially all "white" people in the South have
> African...

This is true of white South Africans as well, if their "in Africa" "white" ancestry goes back a bit (a century or more), and most especially if their biological, in Africa line extends back to anywhere near 1652.

The big biological secret among "totally white" Afrikaaners (mostly but not entirely: South Africans of originally Dutch descent) was that they very, VERY likely had black ancestors.

Even during the worst of apartheid times, the ruling whites knew (sometimes for sure, because they had the records...sometimes just deep in their souls) that the things they were fighting against the most fiercely existed as parts of their own blood, bones, and cells...

...something that is now, often, South African cool to acknowledge.

(There are more than a few white males who are choosing to go through tribal initiation camps as their entrance into adulthood, especially if they have close black friends...and more than a few whites of both genders who are choosing to become tribal sangomas, which generally takes several years of intensive training and practice before sangoma-status is conferred onto them.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/24/2017 01:03AM by Tevai.

In Sykes' book, he related a story of a woman from a white racist Southern family discovering that something like a *third* of her genome was African. She was apparently fine with that, but told her sister of it who viewed it as a moral failing on her (telling sis's) part and had nothing to do with her (being told sis) ancestry. Being full sisters, they of course share on average 50% genome. Sykes found that response to be very frequent from people who identified white *and* black. Over half of black men in the south have European Y chromosomes. Many do not take that well.

Me - I take great delight that as 2% black African, I was ordained into the farcical mormon aaronic and melchizedek priesthoods when "not a drop!!!" was in force, before Kimball had his, ahem, revelation.

I will also wonder for the rest of my days who that (undoubtedly) slave woman was in my past whose body was mere property for someone to use.

Void K. Packer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I will also wonder for the rest of my days who
> that (undoubtedly) slave woman was in my past
> whose body was mere property for someone to use.

Yes. :(

I used to believe that nearly everyone had some sub-Saharan African DNA in their genetic makeup.

Mine had nada.

Thinking of doing a couple other genetic tests to see how they compare to this one.