Submitting your DNA

Well Regarding the 2nd cousin.

There are two kinds of folks who would contact you about that, Legit and scam artists.

But assuming legit... not all that long ago it was not uncommon for a young lady to go for an extended visit to her elderly Aunt or some such.... You know her.. The Nurse at the home for unwed mothers.

And then oh, say 9 months later... Return home..  And nobody says anything.

John From Detroit said:

Well Regarding the 2nd cousin.

There are two kinds of folks who would contact you about that, Legit and scam artists.

But assuming legit... not all that long ago it was not uncommon for a young lady to go for an extended visit to her elderly Aunt or some such.... You know her.. The Nurse at the home for unwed mothers.

And then oh, say 9 months later... Return home..  And nobody says anything.

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For that matter, it's possible a male cousin got a girl pregnant and she gave the baby up for adoption/

Once upon a time, this stuff was all written in the family bible.

There are protections sort of built into that communication system. If my wife reaches out to someone via Ancestry.com regarding an Ancestry DNA match to someone in her tree, that person would also have received a notification of the match already. My wife's Ancestry Id and her tree are public, so he/she can look and see which persons in her tree triggered the match, and how extensive her work has been.
I would be reluctant to respond to a contact request from an Ancestry user with a private tree unless provided with enough information to make me comfortable.

The idea she'd like people to embrace is to keep logging back in periodically and not just read your DNA results once and let that be the end of it. Over time you'll probably get match notifications, maybe contact requests, and from that have the opportunity to help serious genealogists in their work or at least meet some neat people whom you'd never have known otherwise.

I think you're right. I see a commercial from one of those companies, where the client (actor?) is surprised to discover that she is 27% native American. Is it even possible to be 27% anything? One out of four grand parents whoud make her 25% native American.

I have tried to think of some combination that would yield 27%, but I am just about ready to conclude that it is impossible, without going back many many generations.

Joel

You know most if not all of these ancestry DNA sites are backed by the LDS for whatever reason?

Just saying, not suggesting anything more than wondering why they are so interested in gathering as much ancestral info as possible. They have been gathering ancestral info since before DNA science was commonplace.

Bill

Great Horned Owl said:

I think you're right. I see a commercial from one of those companies, where the client (actor?) is surprised to discover that she is 27% native American. Is it even possible to be 27% anything? One out of four grand parents whoud make her 25% native American.

I have tried to think of some combination that would yield 27%, but I am just about ready to conclude that it is impossible, without going back many many generations.

Joel

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The other part of that is, I cannot conceive of any way that anyone could be 27% native American and not know it.

My father once told me that he and my mother had distant common relatives. After doing the searches I have found that my 4Th great grandfather on my fathers side is the same man as my 5Th great grandfather on my mothers side. He also said that my mothers family searched back and found some black Douglass and were so disappointed the quit searching. What they didn't realize apparently is there were two clans, the Black Douglass and the Red Douglass and it had nothing to do with race.

Facebook has put me in touch with people I have not talked to in fifty years and relatives that I never knew existed. I found a daughter (rather she found me) multiple nephews and nieces, old girlfriends.

I am convincing myself to do the DNA test, after all at my age and limited life expectancy there is little damage that could be done. Besides there is one person missing and no record of her. She is my 3rd great grandmother on my fathers side.

You can follow the modern history of the world by doing an ancestry search. I found a relative that was made a nobleman by King James, a family that died from the plague and sent their newborn son to America to escape it, a family that left France to escape the Napoleonic wars. There was a Colonel in George Washingtons staff, a soldier that died at the Alamo and a brother that was in Pattons Army in North Africa. It's all very interesting and like looking for Easter eggs since you never know what you find.

My wife is heavy into genealogy and offered this little tidbit:

Autosomal DNA (abbreviated atDNA) passes down from ALL your ancestors. At each conception, a child receives approximately 50% of this DNA from each parent. But which 50% you get is random. So your siblings may get a different mix and you will probably not inherit equal amounts from each grandparent.

After four generations the amount of common / shared DNA is  undetectable.

Mitochondrial DNA  (mtDNA) that mothers pass on to their children.  Both men and women have mtDNA but only women pass it on.

Y-DNA is chromosomes that men inherit from their father, who got it from their father, etc.  Y chromosome passes on mostly unchanged, but after only a few generations, direct paternal lineage is only a tiny part of any person?s overall ancestry.

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There, now you know.

Tom said:

Once upon a time, this stuff was all written in the family bible.

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Yes, it was and those records have been very helpful and in the case of my Alsacian ancestors were the key in sorting out the DNA findings.  Without them we would not have been able to find the details and actual family branches.  The DNA helped sort out some missing people so we could ask the right questions of others. 

Every record helps.

"I am convincing myself to do the DNA test, after all at my age and limited life expectancy there is little damage that could be done."

Catblaster, at our age doing a DNA test is especially easy. After all, it's just drooling into a cup.  ;D

On the Mormon involvement with genealogy:
Neither of us is Mormon and we have no Mormon relatives that I'm aware of. My wife has spent many hours at the local LDS family history centers and has made several research trips to Salt Lake City. After 10+ years we're not on any Mormon mailing lists (if they exist - we wouldn't know) nor have we been approached or "missioned" in any way about the church.
The Mormon imperative that is the basis for their connection to genealogy is, for non-Mormon genealogists, a very fortunate coincidence.
They do their thing and are very generous about letting others use the fruits of their efforts.

PopPop51 said:

On the Mormon involvement with genealogy:
Neither of us is Mormon and we have no Mormon relatives that I'm aware of. My wife has spent many hours at the local LDS family history centers and has made several research trips to Salt Lake City. After 10+ years we're not on any Mormon mailing lists (if they exist - we wouldn't know) nor have we been approached or "missioned" in any way about the church.
The Mormon imperative that is the basis for their connection to genealogy is, for non-Mormon genealogists, a very fortunate coincidence.
They do their thing and are very generous about letting others use the fruits of their efforts.

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Mormons believe they can pray their ancestors into heaven which is why they are into genealogy so much.  They need to know who their ancestors are in order to do that.  As for non-Mormon access to their records, its easy.  They get many more records contributed for their research purposes.  The only problem is, those records are not proven, yet many people (including some Mormons) use the records and assume they are correct.  After all, they are in the Mormon database so they must be correct. :

    Donna has been into Genealogy for over 40 years.  She will only use information posted on line as reference, but won't add any of the information unless she can confirm it.  She estimates the over 50% of what get posted is incorrect. 
    As for the LDS, their religious rituals have a lot to do with their ancestry, hence they maintain the largest genealogy library in the world.  However, even though they are extremely helpful, neither of us has ever been approached regarding converting to their beliefs, after 2 visits to their Research Center in Salt Lake, or using their local centers.  Family Search is their on line search site.  Ancestry is a private, for profit company that has bought up a lot of information, but makes no effort to ensure it is correct.
    And as far as doing up our DNA, since it provides no specific linkage, she sees little value.  Also, please be aware that once you provide one of these companies with your DNA, it then becomes "public domain" to be used by them as they see fit.
    Ed

"They get many more records contributed for their research purposes.  The only problem is, those records are not proven, yet many people (including some Mormons) use the records and assume they are correct.  After all, they are in the Mormon database so they must be correct."

True up to a point. The biggest hurdle that serious genealogists have to overcome is sloppy genealogists.
Today the Mormon master tree is not just a free-for-all. They want the community to attach documents and sources to people in their master tree in the interest of improving its accuracy and facilitating research.
All family tree entries are "documented" to some degree. The quality of that documentation varies, and each genealogist is free to decide whether they consider a connection "proven" based on their own review of the documentation. So "proof" is in the eye of the beholder.
It's sort of like the often-misused term "scientific fact", of which there are none. The process of science is one of constantly retesting and redefining hypotheses. But the concept of an absolute "fact" is not part or the scientific method. The closest thing to a fact that science can ever produce is a theory, and they get revised all of the time.
(Yes, I am proudly by training a scientist. And no, I don't want to start a discussion on evolution or vaccination or any such thing here.)
Similarly, a genealogical relationship is defined by the quality of its documentation. With everyone now able to publish their documentation in centralized locations, that documentation is more subject to scrutiny than ever before. It's crowd-sourcing on a species-wide scope.

Tom said:

I'm continually surprised when I hear friends and acquaintances tell me they submitted their DNA samples to some online source, then are surprised that the results show their heritage as something way different from what they previously "knew".

Is this just me, or are folks getting taken for a $$ ride?

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No need to pay anybody for your family history.  Just run for public office.  Your opponent will do it for you.

Molaker said:

After watching hours of NCIS, I'm not sure I want my DNA floating around.   No telling what I might be blamed for.

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This is a real concern.  The government has already successfully subpoenaed DNA data from one of the Genealogy sites for the relative of someone they suspected of a crime and used the DNA partial match as evidence against them.  Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back, and it effects not only you, but family members as they can use a familial match.

I'm sticking with entries in the family bible!

I did the DNA test with Ancestry.com and I'm convinced that at least the matches I see are good. I've contact a couple of the matches and they provided information that only a relative would know. I only recently started a family tree and have traced both sides of my family back to the 1500 hundreds here in the US. I don't want to pay the fee to obtain the data bases that could show where they originally came from. My DNA showed 73% Great Britain and 6% Irish and 12% other and this seems to match up with the information I've found during my search. You have to be very careful using other peoples family trees as a source. I contact one person to let them know that my cousin was still alive because he was listed as deceased on their tree.  I try to find official documents like death certificates, marriage license, etc. Because 1940 is the last census released it becomes difficult to locate people born after that.

Bob

Right Wing Wacko said:

This is a real concern.  The government has already successfully subpoenaed DNA data from one of the Genealogy sites for the relative of someone they suspected of a crime and used the DNA partial match as evidence against them.  Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back, and it effects not only you, but family members as they can use a familial match.

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I think I understand your forum user name now.