DNA

[dragonfare]

I've been contemplating doing one of those DNA tests for about a year now, but for a reason that might be considered frivolous. My (beloved) grandmother used to claim she had Cherokee blood in her line, and I always wondered if that was true or just a family myth.

Today I finally gave in and sent for the kit. What a way to start the year, right?

Comments

[dark_star]

I did this a year ago, Ancestry had a Black Friday sale and I asked for one for a Xmas present. The first time they came back with mostly English, and not nearly enough central/eastern Europe (I know my mom was one half Bohemian, so it should have read higher than it did) but they revised it a year later and the mix looks a lot closer to what I expected. Still not quite the right percentages perhaps, but more balanced. A few surprises -- some German? not sure where that came from, or at least not as much as they are suggesting, and the Scotch-Irish should be showing higher I think and the English lower -- but it made more sense and still was revealing. I'm glad I took it.

[dragonfare]

Hey, my mom is Bohemian, too! At least, we think so. My grandma was a wild woman. If family tradition is true, however, I'll be mostly Bohemian and Irish. It seems odd that they'd revise it, though - I mean, you haven't changed your ancestors!

[dark_star]

It's more that they get more DNA from people and so they can refine their results better. The more people send in DNA, the better they sort the sequencing out. I heard a report on public radio years ago when the Human Genome Project was a fairly new thing which said they had pretty good info from western Europe because they had lots of DNA in the data banks from people from there so they could sort things out to specific areas pretty well, however that it was really sparse for Asians and their descendants, for instance, so they couldn't get too specific, but as they gathered more DNA from people, they'd be able to pin specific areas down far better.

I'm pretty sure this was at the very beginning of the Human Genome Project, way back before Ancestry and 23andMe got into it. But I think the upshot is that as the ancestry get more people submitting DNA who have eastern European ancestry, the better they are at pinning things down, and so they revise your results now and then as they've become more precise. I suspect it may be once a year or so, since it was about a year after I first submitted that I got the notice that they'd been revised.

[dragonfare]

Makes perfect sense. Then that's a nice service they provide. I hope my company does the same.

[coastal_spirit]

I hope you'll share it when you get the results. Wes and Katie have both done theirs, and I would like to do mine, although I've got a lot of information from that side of the family from Katie. It seems that we are English and Scottish (no surprise there), but what I find interesting is that both Wes' and my ancestors all seem to originally come from Devon. I was hoping for Cornwall, or some wild Scottish island, but Devon is okay with me.

Both Wes' mother and my maternal grandmother were rumored to have Native American blood, but I guess it was just legend. ;)

[dragonfare]

If it's just legend for me, I imagine I'll be disappointed, too. But not deeply. It was my granma who told me, and I loved her no matter what.