My DNA Story, After 35 Years and Change, has Reached a Fork in the Road.

 The course of my life has been an ever churning torrent of rise and recede. Carving great canyons like the Rio Grande of home. A singular life, witness to: wonders and horrors, experience and innocence, rain and shine. No matter the circumstance this life is mine and strangely enough, i'm pretty damn good with that. 
Like many of you, i jumped out of the nest the instant I thought I had feathers. I had plans. For years I watched those plans fall by the wayside. Largely, they were fanciful dreams never really meant to be applicable in the modern world. Seriously, how was I ever going to play trumpet for Ed Shaughnessy and Doc Severinsen on The Tonight Show?? (I had to look up the spelling of one of those words. On the up side, it wasn't Ed.) Then there was my perverse desire to study giant squid with Jacques Cousteau. Me, a Desert Rat from West Texas.......not bloody likely. Finally, there is the thesis of this opus, finding my biological Father. Again one of those fanciful dreams, until Genealogical DNA testing went mainstream.

Back in February (2018) I bought a DNA kit from Family Tree for the Family Finder and a moderate Y DNA kit. I thought if I were going to search the databases, i'd want to use the narrowest possible criteria going in and could widen my search results from there. I uploaded my raw DNA file to GEDmatch.com and compared with even more people (see the previous two entries for the complete story). There were something in the neighborhood of 78 Thousand cousins on the GEDmatch list from Second Cousin to God only knows how to calculate the relationship. But, as I alluded to in my last posting there was one person at the top of my match chart with a remarkable amount of shared DNA. In fact, He was a perfect half match to me. Just for the tally sheet that would be 3487cM (Centimorgans) That's a Parent/Child match.

I'm going to call him, Mr Y! Now for the most important question, how old is (Oh yeah, present tense, he's very much still alive) Mr Y?? I'll tell you I nearly passed out when I discovered he is not in his 20's or 30s. He's at just the right age for a Father. Well, for a Father with an adult child in their early 50's anyway. At this moment, I needed a minute or two to wrap my head around the impossibility of things. So, I walked away from my computer and just mentally gnawed on that gristle all night.
The next day I ran a utility program to determine whether or not my raw file had been corrupted and it turned out to be a bit noisy, but well within guidelines.
I compared Mr Y to known relatives and my X matches and there were zero commonalities. Okay, so he's a new and stand alone entity. What to do now? Research. Can I put him and my mother in the same location at the same time. This turned out to be the easiest step of the process. He went to college in the same town Mom went to high school. Ultimately, I discovered they both went to that same high school and had a class together.

 There was never a question as to whether to contact him or not it was simply how. The Database had an email address for him, so ding dong there ya go. Now, I studied English Composition at the University of North Texas and have had training in how to write for nearly any occasion or purpose. Writing to contact a Father from an unknown child, weirdly enough, slipped by the curriculum committee when they were deciding on what was important to teach. I sent an email loosely styled on an obituary. I did my very best to use soft pleasant words that alluded to a close genetic match and so on and so forth, sent it, and waited about a week.
During this time, I forgot the first rule of writing and that is know your audience. Every day that went by without a reply was grueling. Why wouldn't he answer? Then my crazy started kicking in. What if he had died and noone had updated the website at his job? What if he thinks this is an internet hoax or scam? What if he's batshit crazy too and just refuses to reply. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. On day six, I sent him another email. This time it was styled on an Arnold Schwarzenegger action film character birthday greeting. Sort of?? 

The main concern for me, now that I had found Mr Y was that I really wanted to know if there were any medical conditions which ran in his family. It's wasn't long after I sent the second email and BING!!! I got a reply. simply enough, he wanted to know who my mother was and what color my hair was when i was a baby/kid. Additionally he wanted to know where I lived. I obliged and said that my grandmother had always said I was "Toe Headed". I think that's how you spell it, I've never looked it up. In the very next email he advised me that if I hadn't had a colonoscopy yet, I needed to go ahead and have that done. I'm not sure what I was looking for in an email, but that didn't exactly not count. and I said I would do just that knowing it to be a favorite of men everywhere!!!

This is the part of the story that gets more private. I'm not doing it to be mean, rather i'm doing it to be fair for all the other parties involved. I will say that since making initial contact Mr Y and I have shared a number of emails. This past weekend Mr and Mrs Y shared a marathon phone call with my domestic partner and myself. I will say a little about that call as I believe it germane to the greater thesis.
The call had a relaxed familiarity to it, even at times when it should have been awkward at best. As we talked, we discovered similarities in behavior and interest. So much so that I grew weary of Donna hitting me every time one came up. It was like being Indiana Jones at the end of a successful caper.

We plan to meet up with the Y's (Face to Face) in the near future. I, for one, am looking forward to it. I know the Domestic Partner is as well and so are the Y's. If you are reading this because you have questions about your ancestry, no matter the case, I say, stop waiting and get after it. Keep an open mind as nothing is ever how you picture it. That Indian Princess your grandpa's grandpa married might turn out to be Irish, and you won't be sitting around years from now wishing you had done it.

I genuinely have a fondness for The Y's as they are a matched set. I don't know how to compartmentalize this and am not about to try. I have found the rest of my family and i'm grateful. Many times I'm derided for my view of fair weather Christians and what Jimmy Buffett referred to as, "that thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning." It is true, I am a confirmed Catholic, but i tend to lean more toward a Unitarian point of view. Toward that end, I do so thank God for this ever winding path, the family I have (old and brand spanking new), and all of you whom have touched my life along the way. I have found a peace I believed impossible.


Until I write again, Peace be with You!!!
Dave

A DNA Story 35 Years in the Making...and change

I would guess it fair to say, most of us have a pretty good idea of our genetic makeup. That is to say, largely, we know where we came from. Most of the people I know can spout off their parents,
grand parents, and to some degree even their great grand parents. Then there is the physical makeup: tall, short, stocky, thin, hair/eye/skin color. These are all fair indicators of ancestry. Next, religion can play a role in this. Lutheranism, probably German somewhere along the way, Presbyterianism, could be Scottish, Maronite Catholic? I'm thinking Lebanon. You get the idea. And then there is food.

The food we consume on special occasions, even on the odd weekend speaks volumes about who we are as people. So, for this, i'll simply stick to what I call ethnic food. For instance: if you eat Black-Eyed peas on New Years, you are probably connected to the southern United States. My first wife's mother (Helga) artfully made Beef Rouladen. A heavenly little package of thinly sliced beef wrapped around a pickle with some mustard and slow cooked in a clay cooker called a Romertorpf (My apologies if the spelling is incorrect). It may sound odd, but it's heavenly and very German. Among other things, my domestic partner Donna makes a meatloaf called Kibbeh (Kib-bee) and it's traditional Lebanese fare. My point here is we all have these ethnic markers around us all the time. We may not have all the answers on how we got here, but we carry the evidence of the journey and in many cases entrust this evidence to our children in the form of tradition.

Without going 20 postings deep, quite often our family names give us as good an insight into our ancestry as any other. Names like Cooper (Barrel Maker), Fletcher (the guy that puts feathers on arrows), and Wright or Smith (both denoting trades requiring the operation of forging iron) let us know our ancestors were most likely European and probably British. If you ever get curious about the origins of your surname, simply google (etymology of the surname *whatever your surname is.)

For my own journey, I took the four closest surnames; Duncan, Weyerts, Johnson, Williamson. This is actually pretty easy. Duncan is largely Scottish, Weyerts is German, both Johnson and Williamson are Scandinavian. Automatically I knew my ethnic chart on my DNA test would show Scotland, Germany, and Swedish or Norwegian. As you can tell by the image at the top of the page, the vast majority of my ethnic makeup is South Central Europe from France to Austria, including parts of Italy?? Insert giggle here as i'm the least Italian looking person on the planet short of say Jackie Chan?

This break down has everything to do with the algorithm they use to compile the data. As you can see in the picture with the purple boundaries, this second website's algorithm works a bit different as they show my German to be half of what the first one did and at the same time show the Scandinavian the first site didn't.

The important thing here is not to get too hung up on what a particular sites algorithm has you listed as because what you are is what you see in the mirror every morning and what others see when you interact with them. Side note: look on the bright side. The larger the sample size they have to work with the more accurate their algorithms will be. I'm predicting that in 20 years there won't be a speck of difference between the sites on ethnic origins. It really is simple statistics.

Another thing that happens when your test is completed, the service will show you a list of everyone in their database with whom you have a genetic match. For the standard consumer autosomal tests like, Family Tree DNA, Ancestry DNA, 23 and Me, etc. The matches carry you out to about 5th cousins. To put this into perspective: I used Family Tree DNA and when I saw my list of genetic matches and all of the 2nd to 4th cousins and noticed there were better than 4500 of them, I laughed.

Now, this is not all bad news. There is a measuring system to determine how closely you are related, but it's a little involved to get into here. If you want to know about the role of Centi-Morgans and SNPs, i'd suggest doing a YouTube search on reading your autosomal DNA report and then go to the ISOGG site and download a cheat sheet with the average numbers and their relationships. It's very handy. I forget what ISOGG stands for other than Genetic Genealogists. There are plenty of resources out there and many of them are in plain old "guy next door" language.

The top entry on my list of genetic matches was my cousin Dean Duncan. I knew him. He died a few years back, but he fit nicely into my family tree since I knew our association. The next closest match I'd never heard of. In fact, i'd never heard of any of the other names on the first page of the list. I sent out a few general "hello we match" type emails and it was still a big mystery as none of the surnames i'd heard of before.

Before I go further, it's important to know I have worked my mother's side of my family tree back to no less than 12 generations. In one spot, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony C.1630. This is just a short 10 years after the Mayflower hit town, so to speak.

So, I went back into research mode and discovered an independent website called GEDmatch.com. You can upload your raw DNA data file to them and they will search their database. Remember I said I had about 4500 cousins on Family Tree, well at GEDmatch that number went ridiculous. If you are a Pop Culture Nerd, that number went Plaid!!!  Not only that, but the relationship numbers were quite a bit higher. I saw my cousin Dean again and another bunch of names I didn't recognize. Then there was the first name on the list. The one with the highest percentage of matching DNA. The number was wholly unlikely.

Let me take a moment to say a few things. I started this whole journey filling in my family tree because my grandfather gave me a piece of paper written in his father's own hand listing the Duncan's back 7 or 8 generations from him. To put this in perspective, two of them were named after George Washington and that's a true story. (Actually, the 2nd had a son whom he named the 3rd) I was curious why they would have left Scotland for the United States. Toward that end the search continues and likely has no real resolution. The reason I augmented my approach to this task with a DNA test was on the off chance I may find some cousins or some other relative who may have more information on that or get an idea of who my Father may have been. Let's face it, i'm in my early 50's and that would make the likelihood of him being alive and kickin' a statistical longshot, but not impossible. Besides, long ago I found that picture of my mother at Stone Mountain Georgia with a tall good looking blond guy who I always believed was the guy and he went to Viet Nam. The romantic in me has always believed he died in Viet Nam and the closest i'd ever get to knowing him would be the monument in Washington D.C.. Then there is the dirty truth of it all, I put off a DNA test because of what I thought I might find. I lived a number of years with little or no regard for anything or anyone, even myself. The thought I may discover a child or children out there that I had no prior knowledge of was a distinct possibility. It's okay, I found my Manties and took the test. What I will say about the closest match on the report is; the match is about as closely related as one can get and they aren't in their 20's or 30's

Until I write again, Peace be with you
Dave