Your ancestry test

[r3gg13]

You could also simply ask a doctor and not givie such important data like your DNA to a company for some random data where no one knows wether they are true or not.

Fair enough, it is true. You can ask your physician for a paneling for such concerns as well.

You do bring up a good and valid point about who you’re leaving your personal data with. IMO, there’s vulnerability for data breach anywhere, it’s a matter of how well thought out their protection protocols are. It doesn’t hurt to be very protective of your data in this case.

 

[Charly]

Knowing my background, I really should take a DNA test.

Well on my French side, Grandparents have Swiss, Chinese & Vietnamese descendents
and Moroccan through Arab and Berber (maybe more)

So the results that could come could be super interesting

 

[r3gg13]

Here is mine. Nothing too surprising really. The 2% Baltic is likely due to me sharing some markers similar to ones found in Baltic people.View attachment 80

 

[fer20]

@r3gg13
You missed the importance of genetic counseling. Regarding personal data, 23andMe (whose founder & CEO has interesting family ties) is making money from it, the company has a deal with GSK.
2% something is statistical noise, no? And you're right, The % is % of markers, there's a lot of misunderstanding about what DTC genetic tests mean

 

[fer20]

you'll probably be Iberian, German or something. Possibly something from Africa. Considering Brazil .

More likely than German: Italian and Lebanese/Syrian. German immigrants arrived first, in early 1800s and they settled mostly in the Southern & Southeastern States. Italian immigration started in the late 1800s, they settled in the same areas and the number of immigrants was bigger, they came maily to replace African slave labor (years later, Japanese immigrants were recruited to replace the Italians). Lebanese immigrants (mostly christian) settled in all parts of the country (and in Latin America)

 

[fer20]

The next info is what made me doubt about the test. My dad is from Castilla-La Mancha, and it's not even listed here. Perhaps their genes have been more often located in Madrid, where many of them moved in the 60s, so the statistics they have don't match with the reality. This is my theory.

maybe bc the region isn't geographically and genetically isolated, we don't share DNA with all of our "cousins", your "cousins" from CLM are not in the database

 

[r3gg13]

@r3gg13
You missed the importance of genetic counseling. Regarding personal data, 23andMe (whose founder & CEO has interesting family ties) is making money from it, the company has a deal with GSK.
2% something is statistical noise, no? And you're right, The % is % of markers, there's a lot of misunderstanding about what DTC genetic tests mean

I do agree with the importance of genetic counseling, this really helps out not only medical treatment plans, but also life plans (I.e. retirement plans when you’re predisposed to or have family hx of late-onset disorder, or a progressive disorder; child-rearing if you’re a carrier of certain disorder). You wouldn’t get that kind of review with just ordering through a 23andMe and the like.

 

[Jeremiah]

I heard that these tests are not true to life.

 

[Uto]

I heard that these tests are not true to life.

They are pretty accurate, but they are limited by the amount of information these companies have in their database. If they had all the DNA in the world the results would be limited by the effectiveness of the search engine used (this almost has to be Elastic Search, which is fast but can be faster if you sacrifice accuracy).

So effectively you will be given a very decent guesstimate, but if there's a random 1% Estonian in here, yeah, that's unlikely to be true. Much more likely then that a family member moved to Estonia at some point, perhaps a member of Napoleon's army for instance and this non-Estonian DNA is now logged as somewhat typical for the Estonian population.

 

[Geborgenheit]

So effectively you will be given a very decent guesstimate, but if there's a random 1% Estonian in here, yeah, that's unlikely to be true. Much more likely then that a family member moved to Estonia at some point, perhaps a member of Napoleon's army for instance and this non-Estonian DNA is now logged as somewhat typical for the Estonian population.

There is no Estonian DNA, at best tests can indicate Eastern European or Baltic ancestry, if you are Estonian.

 

[Geborgenheit]

I have done multiple tests for myself and my family. From 23&me:

 

[Uto]

There is no Estonian DNA, at best tests can indicate Eastern European or Baltic ancestry, if you are Estonian.

If a person is Estonian and is in the database it will show as Estonian DNA if certain markers show significance quite simply put. There really is no other way to do these things. There are a few known haplogroups that might be typically Baltic, but that's not how these tests work I don't think.

 

[Geborgenheit]

If a person is Estonian and is in the database it will show as Estonian DNA if certain markers show significance quite simply put.

But these tests show only regions, they don't show specific nationalities! That's how these tests work. Nobody would guarantee you that you are Estonian or Dutch. They would say Eastern European or Western European at best. Because they cannot tell the difference. Dutch and German are very similar if not identical people, the same with Latvian and Estonian.

The regions 23&me tries to guess are not true for me and I know my family tree till the beginning of XVIII century. In general they are correct though, they have picked up that I am somewhere from Eastern Europe. Somewhere, but exactly Ternopil oblast in Ukraine and Masovian Voivoideship in Poland is clearly wrong.

 

[Uto]

But these tests show only regions, they don't show specific nationalities! That's how these tests work. Nobody would guarantee you that you are Estonian or Dutch. They would say Eastern European or Western European at best. Because they cannot tell the difference. Dutch and German are very similar if not identical people, the same with Latvian and Estonian.

The regions 23&me tries to guess are not true for me and I know my family tree till the beginning of XVIII century. In general they are correct though, they have picked up that I am somewhere from Eastern Europe. Somewhere, but exactly Ternopil oblast in Ukraine and Masovian Voivoideship in Poland is clearly wrong.

It might be regions instead of nationalities, that does not really matter for how these things work. They could put any geographical unit in there basically. Parts of your DNA correlated with significance with people from Ternopil and Masovia, but the search engine has no way of really knowing that this DNA is actually typical for Ternopil and Masovia and more important it does not know if this DNA originated there or if it's the other way around (ie people migrated there). Most of the results you will get are fairly innocuous and most likely correct. The more detail, the less accuracy.

I would not need to do a test like this, my grandfather has researched a lot. I stem from local farmers, my family tree reads like a bad joke, it's just the same villages over and over. However, I'm quite positive that, given the propensity of people to move during times of strife, there must have been some emigration. As such I would expect some of my DNA to correlate with odd places even though my family is like 90% Dutch and 10% German (I live pretty much next to the German border) and this has not changed since 1750 or so.

 

[Geborgenheit]

It might be regions instead of nationalities, that does not really matter for how these things work. They could put any geographical unit in there basically. Parts of your DNA correlated with significance with people from Ternopil and Masovia, but the search engine has no way of really knowing that this DNA is actually typical for Ternopil and Masovia and more important it does not know if this DNA originated there or if it's the other way around (ie people migrated there). Most of the results you will get are fairly innocuous and most likely correct. The more detail, the less accuracy.

They could not put any geographical unit. They have reference panels of people coming from different countries and people from some countries which are similar form clusters. For example, a Dutch person is practically indistinguishable from English or German, but very clearly to tell apart from Polish, Finnish, Greek or Italian. If you would have done the test, they could basically say that you are a guy somewhere from NW Europe.

23&me gives regions based on information of DNA matches who have entered information about their grandparents.

 

[Uto]

They could not put any geographical unit. They have reference panels of people coming from different countries and people from some countries which are similar form clusters. For example, a Dutch person is practically indistinguishable from English or German, but very clearly to tell apart from Polish, Finnish, Greek or Italian. If you would have done the test, they could basically say that you are a guy somewhere from NW Europe.

23&me gives regions based on information of DNA matches who have entered information about their grandparents.

I don't think we disagree, but we're not really speaking the same language here. Let me explain what I mean.

Person ID	Place of Birth	Genetic String A	Genetic Strin B
32634573	Springwell	ACTAAAGACATGTGGA	TCAAGATCAGTGGAT

Place	Part Of:
Springwell	Sunderland	Tyne and Wear	North England	England	Britain	Great Britain	NW Europe	Europe

If they do analysis they check for various parts of genetic code whether or not significant similarities exist with other people, who are in a database with most likely their place of birth. This place of birth can be mapped onto whatever other geographical entity you might want to add, that's what I mean when I say this could be any geographical unit. Now, as you will have significant similarities with people from different places there will generally be a certain geographical clade where the result best describes what they found. The size of their data set is a key factor in this.

So if the result seems vague (like NW Europe) this is indeed because (in the NW Europe example) Germans are genetically all quite alike and any differences are quite evenly spread over a rather large territory. But this is just because it's what the data shows, not by design. So if the aforementioned example of Estonia just doesn't come up in practice it's either because the marker that shows significance is spread over a larger area or because their dataset from the Baltics just isn't large enough to really be sure that anything they predict as Estonian is actually Estonian and they disabled a further breakdown into smaller geographical units.

 

[lilka]

I don't know any of these sites with ancestry tests. Could anyone help me and send me a link? Ofc if you don't want it to look like an ad, you can send me a PM. I'd love to find out if I'm really that much German as I am supposed to be (half-German grandpa - dad's dad) and if there is anything Greek inside me (that would be awesome...)

 

[Ausesken]

I don't know any of these sites with ancestry tests. Could anyone help me and send me a link? Ofc if you don't want it to look like an ad, you can send me a PM. I'd love to find out if I'm really that much German as I am supposed to be (half-German grandpa - dad's dad) and if there is anything Greek inside me (that would be awesome...)

Maybe this will be of your interest: https://www.smarterhobby.com/genealogy/best-dna-test/

 

[Sierra Scafuto]

Thanks for sharing this wonderful post.google

 

[musicfan]

If they do analysis they check for various parts of genetic code whether or not significant similarities exist with other people, who are in a database with most likely their place of birth. This place of birth can be mapped onto whatever other geographical entity you might want to add, that's what I mean when I say this could be any geographical unit. Now, as you will have significant similarities with people from different places there will generally be a certain geographical clade where the result best describes what they found. The size of their data set is a key factor in this.

I saw a video on this and it depends on what their data collection from everyone else has, so another company can give a different kind of result if they have different kind of data. This aspect of 'ethnicity'/tribe or whatever uses comparison and likelihood based on their data pool. It's not precise. Some places are definitely way more interested in this ethnicity stuff than other places (the West in general is more pluralistic and isn't as interested I think). We all originally came from Africa anyway.

The health aspect could be more interesting, at least in cases it can be more specific to the genes of the person paying the money, rather than just on probability based on the available pool of company data. Anything which is just vaguer, whether origins or anything else has got a decent chance of being a rip off. A good way to look at your health risks may be to find the death certificates of past relatives as well and see what they say.