Posted on 10/08/2017 1:10:31 PM PDT by madison10
I happen to be a member of one of the genealogical sites. Currently my DNA profile is 78% Western European and a typical native Western European is 48%. Which means 30% more of MY DNA came from the region than that of a native.
Thank God I am not in Europe welcoming the Muslim hordes.
Thankfully, mine’s not THAT common... lol
Mine is almost that bad for father’s father. John Bell of Pennsylvania. It’s almost the equivalent of John Smith. Mother’s father I can take into early 1600’s England and Scotland, thru TX, KY, TN and VA. Mother’s mother is the deadend. But father’s mother, good lord!! I never met father. Mother left him when I was 6 weeks old. But I found his mother’s obituary among photos mother was sent when he died. It said that her pallbearers were the Governor of Colorado and three generals. I knew then that I was going to be able to climb that branch of the tree! They LIVED in the newspapers all the way back into the 1600s.
Interesting that you mention the old newspapers. I was just getting back here about those archives.
Many states have their old newspapers on the internet. Some states are better than others. New York state is very good.
http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org
It’s possible to go back and very easily look at newspapers from 1850 and 1860. In the olden days the newspapers covered local news. Each little village might have its own column and it posted local news such as, Mrs. Smith has the flu or Mr. Jones hitched up the wagons and traveled into Binghamton, Mr. Ryan fell off the hay wagon, or the Fiskes had a pie social at their house Saturday night.
The newspapers also have a great source of information about births, deaths and marriages. The obituaries are the best. They tell how many children, give their names and best of all give the cities in which they now live.
It was in these old newspapers I learned that my g.g.grandfather got married after his wife of 45 years died. I had no idea, certainly not from my relatives. That marriage, BTW, was never mentioned in his obit and he was buried with his first wife.
Back before newspaper archives online, my husband got me a large microfilm reading that would go directly into our computer. NY State Archives sent microfilm of the 1700s newspapers and I spent a year in a tiny room from waking to sleeping living in a time when George Washington was spoken of in the present tense. It was priceless research I was doing for Night Before Christmas. Besides tracking down every person that ever interacted with Henry Livingston, I was having to identify which newspaper poems would be his based on pseudonym or style. Learned a MASSIVE amount about pseudonyms out of that year.
The poem also appears in his handwritten poetry manuscript book, and the child’s name was actually Timmy Dwight, son of Rev. Timothy Dwight the president of Yale, and a cousin of Henry’s wife. That’s how we guarantee the connection of the R pseudonym with Henry.
Genealogy can be fascinating, especially if you love history. It gives you a sense of actually being there for historic events, in a sense, with your own people having been there. You’ll find some illustrious people, or most will. You’ll find some embarrassments, or most will. But, the majority will be just regular people going about their daily lives, sometimes in extraordinary circumstances not necessarily of their choosing.
Many if not most Americans of European descent have at least a little nobility in their lines. Finding this is a treasure trove because they’re the ones that you can take back to almost the dark ages. Surnames were uncommon for anyone but nobility prior to the 13th or even 14th century in many countries of Europe, and surnames are largely what makes genealogical research possible. Certain religious groups were sticklers for record-keeping, too, so that can be a tremendous help, church records. In the US proper, census records can often get you past a brick wall, but some didn’t want to have records kept of their comings and goings, apparently, so you may have to just live with a few mysteries.
As far as the genetic testing, I’d say it’s beneficial for those who have nowhere to start, as far as actual records of their ancestors due to not knowing who their ancestors actually are, or an inability to access such records. Me, I know every boat that all of mine disembarked from, from Jamestown in 1610 to Philadelphia in 1738. I haven’t done the genetic testing because I’ve felt no need to do so. The only way there would be any surprises would be due to infidelity (possible but not highly likely) or due to a desire to conceal something. There was a time when native ancestry was looked down upon, and “indian” can cover a heck of a lot of ground, so I suppose there are a few surprises potentially with that.
Speaking of native ancestry, the toughest ones are the natives, in my instance literally Cherokee, all wives. They just materialize, no surname, no family recorded, given names that sound like nicknames because they usually were their English nicknames.
It’s a fun hobby, don’t let yourself be put off by the snobs and there are a few who pursue this for self-aggrandizement. Keep in mind that nearly everybody has at least a little nobility in America, who descends from European people. At a minimum you can claim Charlemagne, but then again so can everyone else. Getting a big head for finding illustrious ancestors is therefore foolish, being ashamed of shall we say too-colorful ancestors is foolish too.
Alright now, just logged on to Ancestry.Com and I was wrong about who might have Turkish blood(Italian/Greek 8% including Turkish) and it was my brother’s wife, not my brother and me. She has the “colorful” family tree while we as as”WASPy” as any white man can get! 38 percent from Great Britain, 27 Ireland, 19% from Scandinavia, and 15 Western Europe. White, very white.
As for my Scots ancestry, looked over my notes and we, if the research can be believed, had an ancestor that was an Earl and married Matilda, sister of Robert I “the Bruce”, King of Scots(Yes, the very one from “BraveHeart)(I’d rather be related to William, oh well...)
Later his descendants fought and lost the Battle of Breton and as punishment was sent over to America.
Don’t know if all is true and correct but that what “seems” to be. Frankly, I don’t trust any “copy” of documents other than the dates and names from my granny’family Bible and it only goes as early as the early 1880’s.
If you want to go beyond the standard 400 year window, you need to run your raw DNA data against one of many ancestry calculator services out there. The standard reports are pretty much meaningless for true ancestry.
What drives one to care about that? No offense to you, but when I see some of the folks on TV ads for DNA testing, I have trouble understanding their slant on how happy it makes them.
As a PhD in genetics, what would you tell someone about DNA testing that didn’t show obvious Cherokee DNA from a g-g-g grandmother that family legend said was at least part Cherokee? Does the DNA test disprove that particular family legend?
Look...... over there behind that tree...... It’s a globalist. I think.
Look...... over there behind that tree...... It’s a globalist. I think.
Actually, my Ph.D. is in biochemistry and molecular biology, not genetics. I study the behavior of biological molecules, although I do understand genetics.
Anyway, the answer to your question starts with the fact that each child receives roughly half of the DNA of each parent. So, the contribution of any particular ancestor in the family tree becomes very small within a few generations. You have 50% of your parent’s DNA, 25% of your grandparent’s, 12.5% of your g-grandparent’s, then 6.25 (gg), 3.125 (ggg), etc.
The other factor is that DNA “recombines” in the germ cells. During recombination, each chromosome that you received from your mother pairs up with the corresponding chromosome from your father and they swap sections. Like this:
aagactaggacctc (maternal chromosome)
AAGACCAGGACTTC (paternal chromosome)
AAgacCAGGAcctc and aaGACtaggaCTTC (germ cell chromosomes)
So, let’s say that the “cctc” is a Cherokee gene marker and “CTTC” is a Caucasian marker. So if your child ends up with the “CTTC” chromosome, he or she has completely lost that marker. Please note that I used lowercase and uppercase to denote which chromosome came from which parent; this usage has no genetic significance.
I made these “chromosomes” very small to illustrate the point. In reality, we are talking about chromosomes that swap thousands or millions of letters across their length of tens to hundreds of millions of letters. (Each letter is a nucleotide.) A genetic marker can be as small as a few dozen letters. These markers make up only a tiny fraction of the DNA: if you take any two people at random, they are 99.5% identical genetically. So, we are only looking at that 0.5% of DNA to make ethnic comparisons.
Through recombination, it is possible for genetic markers representative of a specific ethnic background to completely disappear. In my case, I can find German immigrants in my family tree and I have a German family name—but my ethnic genetic profile does not show German ancestry at all. Primarily, it shows British, Irish, Scandinavian, Iberian, and traces of Bantu, Indian (not native American), and the Caucasus.
One last factor is that a genetic marker is not necessarily unique to a certain ethnic background. The determinations of ethnicity via genetics are made using statistical methods. So, going back to my example above, with “CCTC” and “CTTC” being the ethnic marker, we would determine the prevalence of each marker in each population. For example, we can determine that 90% of Cherokees have the “CCTC” marker, and 75% of Caucasians have the “CTTC” marker. So even if you have the CTTC marker, it is not proof that you have no Cherokee ancestors. When the sites like Ancestry.com, etc., look at markers, they actually derive a probability of your ancestry using statistical methods. They look at each marker’s prevalence in various populations, and how many of each marker you have. For example, if you have 10 markers that each occur in 50% and 20 markers that occur in fewer than 10% of Iberian people, they will use that data to calculate the likelihood that you have Iberian ancestry.
One last little complication is the fact that, although you share 50% of your DNA with each parent, you share variable amounts of DNA with your siblings. It is possible (but not likely) that you share no or all of your DNA with your sibling. So your ethnic profile might be different from your sibling’s—i.e. your sibling might show Cherokee ethnicity while you do not.
Yeah, I know—this is a very long and complicated answer to your questions. I hope it is all clear; feel free to ask for further explanation on any point.
I noticed on the preview that my chromosome illustrations don’t line up... they would look better in a fixed font, but I don’t know how to make html show a fixed font. The reply window has a fixed font.
Glad to see some of you are coming around to my theory! ;)
“The data on the tombstones can be wrong”
And census data too. An old g.g.uncle was married to a gal whose age was off by ten years in the census. After her husband died she married their boarder who was about 20+ years younger than she was. They are all buried next to one another.
Find-a-grave is not gospel either. Far from it. Relatives guess the d.o.b. when ordering the tombstone. Well meaning relatives submit information to the website that is just plain wrong. Case in point, Charles Comiskey, of the Chicago White Sox. The information for his wife is wrong. Someone confused the information for Charles’ mother and his wife’s mother. It may not seem like a big mistake but when you’re trying to unravel a mystery it is a big deal.
Absolutely fascinating. Love the stories.
Curiosity. Knowing where we came from culturally, ethinicity, others to whom we are related. It is a grounding especially if one has NEVER known who their ancestors were.
I find it hard to understand why a person would NOT want to know.
When I was five my mother showed me a picture of my great-grandmother (from my mother's side of the family) who was very ill when the picture was taken and I was barely three months old. She made a comment at the time that she looked like an Indian squaw. Being five I thought that she was an Indian squaw and I thought that I had some Indian blood in me. A couple years ago when my daughter and I began doing our family tree I asked my mom about the picture and she told me that she was not Indian but Slovakian.
I have to admit I liked the thought of having Indian blood.
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