Anybody check their DNA history through Ancestry.com, Ancestry.ca??

[Totalize]

Hi Guys,

I purchased one of those Ancestry DNA kits and recently got my results back. While the results are not pinpoint accurate they are still quite accurate in telling you what part of the world your ancestors came from.

I was a little shocked to see how much British and Italian/Greek blood I have flowing through my veins. My last name is Portuguese (though I don't speak it) and though I can trace my British lineage back to my 3x Great Grandmother Janet Buchanan( A lowland Scot) who married a Dutchman Alfred Van Sluytman who in turn married my 2X Great Grandmother Elizabeth Whaite (Anglo-Norman) I still thought I would be like 90% Pork and cheese but alas my results show 23% Italian/Greek, 18% Iberian/Portuguese (my name originates from North West Spain but I believe my ancestors migrated to Northern Portugal some time in the middle ages, ie the old Iberians mixed with the Germanic Suevi tribe), 35% British, 10% West European (Must be the Dutch) and 5% North African (Huh???) and 10% cannot determine. My lineage seems to be more pronounced through my maternal side. Could this have something to do with why some cultures trace their names and lineage through the mother not the father?

 

[fubar57]

Interesting. I've wondered while watching these kinds of ads on TV how you can be an odd percent of something when you have 2 parents, 2GPs, 2GGPs,etc. Every ad is like that

 

[swampyankee]

My younger daughter got 23&me for her birthday (she asked for it) and sent the data to, among other places, U Chicago, which has has a program investigating human migration.

Insofar as we can tell by genealogy, my father's ancestry is English (we've got data going back to the 16th Century; reliable data for non-noble families is sparse before that, especially with things like the various English civil wars of that era) and my mother's is northern Italian. My wife's is southern Italian.

Somewhere, my daughter's DNA shows ancestry that includes Ashkenazi Jewish and the Levant.

My opinion?

Do remember that there's not a part of Europe that hasn't been invaded. Invading soldiers tend to include some portion of rapists and occupied populations include some portion of women, especially poor women, who face the choice between starving and sleeping with the enemy. Slave-holding cultures, which included all of them, would also tend to give female slaves little sexual choice. Most slave-holding societies had mechanisms for manumission (manumission was actually forbidden in some polities including, if I recall, parts of the ante-bellum US South), and children with more ancestry of the slave-holders may have been more likely to be freed (one of the circumstantial items surrounding Sally Hemings is that her children were the only slaves every freed by Jefferson, tending to support the position that Jefferson was the father).

In other words, anybody who claims to be pure European anything is either uninformed or lying.

 

[mikewint]

Could this have something to do with why some cultures trace their names and lineage through the mother not the father?

You have two kinds of DNA, Cellular DNA which is 50% maternal and paternal thus is being constantly mixed through the generations. The second type is MITOCHONDRIAL DNA. The mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cells converting ADP to ATP which provides the energy to carryout all cellular reactions. The mitochondria come ONLY from the maternal side and thus are much easier to track and trace through out time.

 

[pbehn]

My younger daughter got 23&me for her birthday (she asked for it) and sent the data to, among other places, U Chicago, which has has a program investigating human migration.

Insofar as we can tell by genealogy, my father's ancestry is English (we've got data going back to the 16th Century; reliable data for non-noble families is sparse before that, especially with things like the various English civil wars of that era) and my mother's is northern Italian. My wife's is southern Italian.

Somewhere, my daughter's DNA shows ancestry that includes Ashkenazi Jewish and the Levant.

My opinion?

Do remember that there's not a part of Europe that hasn't been invaded. Invading soldiers tend to include some portion of rapists and occupied populations include some portion of women, especially poor women, who face the choice between starving and sleeping with the enemy. Slave-holding cultures, which included all of them, would also tend to give female slaves little sexual choice. Most slave-holding societies had mechanisms for manumission (manumission was actually forbidden in some polities including, if I recall, parts of the ante-bellum US South), and children with more ancestry of the slave-holders may have been more likely to be freed (one of the circumstantial items surrounding Sally Hemings is that her children were the only slaves every freed by Jefferson, tending to support the position that Jefferson was the father).

In other words, anybody who claims to be pure European anything is either uninformed or lying.

Also in Europe it should also be borne in mind that until the railways allowed many people to move passports were not essential, people moved just to work without any invasion or military activity being involved. Churches in East Anglia look very similar to those in Netherlands because they were built by the same people, experts in draining marsh land. The Norman invasion and the Crusades resulted in a group of people who owned land amd castles all the way from the British Isles to the middle east, not only did they marry people from other nations their artisans like stone masons glass makers dress makers etc. For hundreds of years there was a strong connection between Yorkshire England and Burgundy in France via the church. There are two abbeys with the same name Fountains abbey in Yorkshire and Abbey de fontenaye they were built by the same Cistercian order.
Fountains Abbey - Wikipedia
Abbey of Fontenay - Wikipedia

There may not have been huge numbers of people moving but these were wealthy people they had big families whos children were most likely to thrive.

 

[swampyankee]

Could this have something to do with why some cultures trace their names and lineage through the mother not the father?

One can, with much more certainty, assign maternity than paternity.

 

[swampyankee]

Interesting. I've wondered while watching these kinds of ads on TV how you can be an odd percent of something when you have 2 parents, 2GPs, 2GGPs,etc. Every ad is like that

Rounding. You have a long sum of negative powers of two.

 

[Lucky13]

Never tried this, but....my dad's cousin (if I remember correctly), is doing some genealogy or whatyacallit and the last we heard from her, she'd managed to work her way back to 1652!

 

[mikewint]

Jan, that would be amazing and spectacular if correct. Official-type records birth/death/marriage simply were not kept. Royalty/Nobility generally yes due to land ownership/titles/ect. Families if well-to-do kept family bibles and at times a parrish church might record such things in their Bible for their congregation. So much beyond the 1800's such things become very difficult to track, handwriting variations, language/dialect changes, creative spelling, it goes on and on

 

[FLYBOYJ]

I have done this and it confirmed a paper trail of documents I found on Ancestry and several other sites. What I discovered was truly amazing.

To start with - my mom and dad were around 7th cousins and never knew it.
My ancestors were the first settlers in Puerto Rico.
I had ancestors who lived in St. Augustine, dozen of years before the pilgrims arrived.

Now here's where it gets interesting...

My DNA is 33% Iberian Peninsula, 25% Italian, 13% African, 13% Irish, 10% Native American, 5% British, 1% other (middle eastern, eastern European)

I always considered myself 100% Spanish.

What I discovered...

I am related to

Christopher Columbus (both maternal and paternal)
Juan Ponce de Leon (who was part Italian)
Diego de Benavides de La Cueva - first Viceroy to Peru
Admiral Ruggiero De Lauria - Italian Admiral from the 1200s
Conquistador Alonso Aviles de Avila, was one of Cortez's lieutenants.

That's just a few.

Confirmed with with DNA matches to dozens of other people who match up to the same transcribed records. Some of the folks I linked up with had their ancestry lineage done by professional genealogists.

Last April I visited Puerto Rico and found landmarks that were significant to my family or that actually mentioned them by name.

The brick building is the ruins Hacienda Florida located in the town of Santa Isabel. Several yeas ago someone decided to build a warehouse on the original structure. My 4th GGF Jose Maria Colon de Torres owned this property in the 1840s.

This plaque was found in the town of Coamo. Juan Colon de Luyando is my 11th GGF and helped found that town. Ignacio was my 11th GGU. BTW "Colon" is a Spanish pronunciation of "Columbus."

This last one commemorates the Battle of San Juan Hill (not the battle from the Spanish/ American War). Sorry for the lopsided image.

My 10th GGF Capitán y Sargento Mayor Ucleseño Garcia deTorres was killed there 4 Nov 1625 while fighting Dutch invaders.

I have my family roughly going back to the 1200s. Four years ago I knew nothing about my family. Since joining Ancestry I not only traced my family roots but have met several second and third cousins.

 

[at6]

As my Grand Mother once said,"I won't go poking around with the past because I don't want to know that I'm related to an Irish horse thief."

 

[mikewint]

Human genetics/ancestry is a numbers game. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. But this ancestral expansion does not continue ceaselessly into the past. If it were, your family tree at the time of Charlemagne would contain more than a billion ancestors – more people than were alive then. What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves in a few generations and become less tree-like, and more web-like. In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that all Europeans are descended from exactly the same people. Basically, everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today.

So if you're vaguely of European extraction, you are related to Charlemagne. A very "fruitful" ruler, he sired at least 18 children by multiple wives and concubines, including Charles the Younger, Pippin the Hunchback, Drogo of Metz, Hruodrud, Ruodhaid, and not forgetting Hugh.

Therefore we carry the traces of our ancestors in our cells, well sort of. Plenty of companies have emerged that provide this genetic ancestry service, such as 23andMe and Ancestry DNA. Spit in a test tube, and they will match parts of your DNA with people from all over the world. The results are suggestive, but don't necessarily show your geographical origins in the past. They show with whom you have common ancestry today. It has become big business today. People love discovering that they're a bit Viking, or a bit Saracen and one company even offers a service whereby it would tell you the precise village location of your genetic ancestry 1,000 years ago. It's a peculiar thing to claim, as you will have thousands of ancestors 1,000 years ago, and I'm pretty sure they won't have all come from the same village.

The truth is that we all are a bit of everything, and we come from all over. If you're white, you're a bit Viking. And a bit Celt. And a bit Anglo-Saxon. And a bit Charlemagne. This is not to disparage genetic genealogy and ancestry. Done right, it is an immensely powerful tool for studying families and human migrations. DNA can disclose unknown cousins or parents. Further back, the past becomes dimmer, but not invisible.

Genetic ancestry can be determined via the Y chromosome, which is inherited only through the paternal line, or by mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed on from mothers. These make for persuasive – but often simplistic – analyses of ancestry. These two chunks of DNA make up only 2% of your genome. But the other 98% has to come from somewhere too, and that is a pick-and-mix from all the rest of your ancestors.

With each subsequent generation, the contribution from an individual from your lineage becomes less. Half of your genome comes from your mother and half from your father and quarter from each of your grandparents, but because of the way the DNA deck is shuffled every time a sperm or egg is made, it doesn't keep halving perfectly with each generation. If you're fully outbred (which you aren't), you should have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. But their genetic contribution to you is not equal. Before long, you will find ancestors from whom you bear no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline. Even though you are directly descended from Charlemagne, you may well carry none of his DNA.

So quite simply Ancestry is messy. Genetics is messy, but powerful. People are horny. Life is complex. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

 

[buffnut453]

So quite simply Ancestry is messy. Genetics is messy, but powerful. People are horny. Life is complex.

Sounds a bit like the Billy Currington song, "God is great. Beer is good...and people are crazy."

 

[mikewint]

Yea in Ye Olde Times there was a heck of a lot of rollicking back and forth over the hill to see what the neighbors had grown, stored or borne

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Never really had a desire to do this. I am happy with what I know about my ancestry, and don't care to verify or dabble into it further. German, Austrian and Polish. My mother is full German, and we have her families "Stammbuch" (Family Tree basically) going back several hundred years. My fathers side of the family is a little more obscured, but that is okay with me as well.

 

[Clave]

I am 100% British - That's a state of mind not DNA....

 

[mikewint]

I fiddled a bit on Ancestry.com but never went beyond grandparents. On my paternal-side G-G Grandparents arrived in America from the Hochsauerland District North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordhein-Westfalen) in 1848-49 running from the German revolution as they had been involved with their towns administration and were upper class artisans. The town is still there dating from 1270 AD in the middle of the Sauerland and is basically a small winter resort town of about 13,000. The paternal-side quickly moved to Chicago. Grandpa was well educated and a skilled machinist and became a chief designer for Uarco where he held 3-4 patents and held quite a bit of stock in the company. Grandma died early of spinal cancer and I never really knew much about her.
On the Maternal-side it's a mixture and poorly documented. Granddad came from northern Germany near the North Sea in the Bremen-Niedersachsen District near the town of Oldenburg where his family was involved with horses. They arrived in the US roughly in 1880 settled in Indiana on a farm in Rensselaer, Indiana which they farmed and eventually raised draft horses. When they were old enough he and his brothers split as some wanted to continue farming and others had enough and wanted citylife. Grandpa moved to Chicago where he quickly found his Horse-skills in demand working for the CTA and Fire Dept. Grandma arrived later 1895 or so from the Hesse region of Germany where her family had raised pigs. Grandma had no birth record and was either born in Germany just before they emigrated or on the ship that brought them here or just after arrival in the US. Grandpa worked for the CTA driving the horse-drawn street cars and then the electric street cars for 25 years.