DNA testing?

[castledangerous]

I recently read an article reviewing the DNA testing option from ancestry.com. Looks like they liked the testing results.

http://geekdad.com/2013/06/follow-up...ising-results/

Several replies to the article were less than positive. They suggested some other companies:

https://www.23andme.com/
http://www.familytreedna.com/

I'd be interested to hear what you think if you do try one.

I had the test done with Ancestry.com. I was a bit disappointed, as all they do is tell you percentages and a list of "cousins", and it doesn't specify parts of the British Isles. I got results of 91% British Isles, 7% Finno-Ural-Volga, and 2% Unknown. I know I have at least 5% German ancestry, but that did not show up, and the "cousins" displayed with that ancestry don't have any Finno-Ural-Volga shown, so it doesn't make logical sense.

[Stan]

When you have a DNA test to find out your genetic home land, this is just the first step. The results need to be interpreted, and and then cross referenced to be used as the tool to locate your genetic home.

I'm of the opinion that if you really want the results (and accuracy) that you think your looking for, than it's not a laymen's job, and this interpretation is best done by (in my case) a geneticist (PhD) not a genealogist. If any one (and for all those who are) interested here's a link to a web site that will help you contact Dr. (PhD) T, Bowers who IS a geneticist, and in my case pinpointed my genetic (Scottish) home land to with in about a 3 miles radius.

http://www.scottishorigenes.com/. The cost for his time was nominal, and the results of his investigation of my genetic home land was nothing less than incredible. It was the best money that I'd spent in a long time !!

Stan L. (DNA proven to be an ancient, Viking, Scott, and bronze age ,Brit)

[Elizabeth]

I have done Ancestry's Autosomal test, just sent in a sample to 23andme, uploaded my Ancestry results to GEDmatch.com, and will add my results from 23and me to the Family Tree database when I get them. These are the autosomal tests. Since I am a woman no Ydna for me and the mtdna shows very little at this point. It's addicting! It's also a bargain right now due to a price war, Ancestry is 99.00, 23and me is 99.00, and you can upload to FTDNA for 69.00 as of this day.

DNA testing is in it's infancy. If you test now be prepared to be patient as the science moves ahead. Each company database has different sample bases and has their own interpretation of samples. Ancestry is getting ready to update their admix at the end of the year, I'm looking forward to see what the update shows as I administer 4 tests there.

http://www.scottishorigenes.com/ is only for ydna, so no use for your wife. She will have to do one of the autosomal tests to get any useful results.

[SeumasA]

My experience with FamilyTreeDNA is that it is great for finding genealogical connections (or ruling them out). However, if you're looking for deep ancestry it takes a little more work. They do have a page on ancestral origins. But those origins are just from asking each person they test the birthplace of their most distant known ancestor. If you want something more scientific you have to do some digging on your own. Once you have your results, you can upload them to somebody like Ysearch.org and compare them to the modal haplotypes. The scottishorigenes.com site listed above looks interesting. I may have to look into it a little more.

[Oldhiker]

Here is the link to the biggest and first company in the genealogy DNA testing business. http://www.familytreedna.com/ they have a database of almost 250,000 people tested. One industry problem is lack of uniform testing from company to company making comparing results from one database to another. That doesnt mean a smaller company is doing it wrong just different markers and nomanclature.

[Pleater]

I've been considering having such testing done, as well. I am an ancestry.com member, and thus far my searches have all resulted in finds throughout the UK (with a brief stop in Nova Scotia.) But I've been wondering if there's any chance that the Roman occupation of Britania and forays into Caledonia may show some continental European influences, as well. Or perhaps a bit of Scandanavian influence from the north...

I suspect that you are hoping for far more specific information than can be deduced - 'Roman's' were a very diverse lot, it isn't possible to separate Vikings from Normans as they were the same people, and after all, Britain was repopulated from Europe just after the last ice age by people walking across the as yet unflooded North Sea, and then folk turned up in boats from North, East and South.

Don't let me put you off having a test done as it can show up interesting things - but it can't tell the difference between a Roman general in 0000AD and an intellectual fleeing Nazi persecution in 1937.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

[unixken]

I suspect that you are hoping for far more specific information than can be deduced - 'Roman's' were a very diverse lot, it isn't possible to separate Vikings from Normans as they were the same people, and after all, Britain was repopulated from Europe just after the last ice age by people walking across the as yet unflooded North Sea, and then folk turned up in boats from North, East and South.

Don't let me put you off having a test done as it can show up interesting things - but it can't tell the difference between a Roman general in 0000AD and an intellectual fleeing Nazi persecution in 1937.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

All of what you've said is understood, Anne. But my motivation isn't "hope". It's "it would be interesting/neat to see." The point being, my genealogical searches have "localized" my past to Scotland, England, and Ireland. Knowing full well the geologic, political, and military influences upon the islands, I'd be put off by ANY tests that said "that's all there is to you."

It was never my intent to suggest I put great faith in the results of a test. What I said was that I "wonder" if the tests would show some external influences (and which influences it would show.)

[Salvianus]

It's an interesting and ever-improving field and participation is what keeps it improving.

I had my Paternal line tested a few years ago as a gift from my wife, by "oxfordancestors" a spinoff company from Professor Bryan Sykes' team which did a lot of the early work in trying to make genetic trends with respect to geography more intelligible to the public, probably most well known for book "The Seven Daughters of Eve" (2001). They were very professional, have a follow-up website community, can do the maternal line and offer a simplified cheaper test if you are looking specifically at a likely long British association. One slightly off-putting side effect of the popular influence is that they (like other such outfits) attach easier-to-remember supposedly culturally representative names to the different Haploid groups, which I find a bit silly, but they do give you the proper genetic names and outline the considerable uncertainties involved with trying to pin down an attachment to what we think of today as ethnicities and nations based upon genetic mutations which happened before Britain was an island and vast migrations were occurring across the Old World - so long ago we couldn't even say what language the people were speaking, let alone what sort of group identities people might have had about themselves beyond their immediate community, if any.

The point in my case was that my parents had already traced my paternal line back to the end of the 15th century for certain on the English side of the Welsh Marches and thence from the genealogical work done for the College of Arms into north Wales to the 11th century and possibly a good deal further, which in all honesty should be regarded with some scientific caution.

The puzzle was that while our surname was a popular recurring name in Wales in the Middle Ages and gave rise to a number of Anglicised variants, some of which are well represented in Scotland, linked to Pictish ancestry, the origin of the name is ascribed to a particular 5th century West Saxon whose father seemed to bear a British (or Brythonic, if you prefer) name. So in our case, we were quite interested in finding out if the actual line suggested a "Germanic" or "Celtic", i.e. Western European "origin" (either of which might fit that association) or if things had gone astray (as statistics tells us is quite common) and we had the name but with "origins" in Scandinavia or elsewhere.

At the level we looked at I (pleasingly to me) turned out as bog-standard western European, Haploid R1b, which increases pretty evenly from the south-east of England (naturally, with the most cross-channel intermix, but still a majority - 65%) fanning out in sedentary families as you go west across the British Isles and highest in the west of Eire, into the upper 90%, but also well represented in more static communities in Wales and Scotland and of course common in continental western Europe as well, particularly down the Atlantic coast of Portugal & Spain. This is what most people call "Celtic" ancestry. Yes, to repeat, most English men have "Celtic" rather than "Anglo-Saxon" paternal lines, as we understand it today. The "replacement" or "Anglo-Saxon ethnic cleansing" theory based on an early study doesn't seem to have held up, however much it echoed Gildas' anguish.

At this level of detail, the national boundaries within the islands seem fairly insignificant, because they are just too recent and too permeable to have made much difference, however we might notice the accents and rightly cherish our various traditions :-)

I recently attended a lecture by Alistair Moffat, touching on material from his books "The Scots: A Genetic Journey" (2011) and particularly his new "The British: A Genetic Journey" (2013), which he was prompted to write after an innocuous lecture looking at Scottish pre-history was widely and wildly misrepresented as suggesting there was a deep genetic divide between "the Scots" and "the English".

He debunks a lot of these sort of attempts to use genetics improperly and presented some of the newest insights into how the strong concordance of DNA between Britain and parts of modern Spain might confirm the existence of population "refuges" in the last ice age, how they identified the murdered family of the Russian Tsar through other descendants of Queen Victoria, how modern populations really do have a surprising amount of DNA in common with Neanderthals and how a few participants in the BritainsDNA project have been surprised to find they have recent, probably 18th century African ancestors, but largely he explains the large scale movements of ordinary people, suggests a tie-in between the genetic evidence and the rise of farming in western Europe and emphasises the most the astonishingly close blood relationships of humanity in it's long and oddly bottle-necked expansion from Africa.

He says they are close to cautiously attempting to differentiate a "Pictish" population residue from the standard British population, which obviously will be of great interest to many of us, and confirms that they still can't differentiate between Scandinavian ancestry which might have arrived (as it did in some concentrations like Dublin, The Wirral and the Isles) during what people call Viking times from the debatable proportion of the "Norman" elite who were installed by William the Conqueror who actually had Scandinavian origins themselves (as opposed to those genetically indistinguishable from the "Saxons" "Welsh" and "Scots" that they ruled).

He still had to admit that despite his professional understanding of the melting pot nature of human and especially British ancestry, he still felt some chagrin that despite being a proud Scot, with a good Borders name and historic genealogy, his prehistoric ancestors were Germanic, what most people would called "Saxon".

[James McFetters]

I tried Family Tree DNA a few years back and liked it. I did have to wait a year or two for good results until others had a chance to join into the group.

[TJ Kelley]

I wanted to do one until my Father in law received his. The test results were very ambiguous. I got the feeling they were in cahoots with a soothsayer.