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