General Chat

DNA is regularly used in forensic science as key evidence.
So inaccurate that it has been successfully used to solve many cold cases!

It has become a vital health tool.
It was used to prove the lineage of Richard Iii remains.

I have not shelled out for the Ancestry DNA test. Rellie found me from a match she had with my 2nd cousin. Ay do not just hand out Yr details I'm such a case you get a message asking if you wish for contact

I have mixed feelings about Ay DNA so have not used it. Otoh I can do nothing about close rellies. For sure Ay have reached a critical mass and poss make money out of it than member subs.

The desire to K ow who we are and where we came from is very strong.

Oh, I don't deny that people have found rellies they didn't know exist, but I do not trust the science being used by some of the companies, I do not trust the companies to keep results safe OR not to keep them if that is what they promise, and I think they give people a wrong idea of "finding themselves".


There actually was a very interesting case here in Canada in the last few years. The guy was interviewed on radio earlier this week.

He was raised as a "black Irishman" (his description), didn't know who his father was, and I think was initially raised to believe that his mother was actually his sister. A couple of years ago he was in his mid-50s and had his DNA tested with 123andme because he wanted to know something about his inherited medical prospects.

He did make a big point about the fact that 123andme is not one of the sites that generally connect people.

He was contacted by email by a young woman in another province who said that she believed he was her grandfather as 123andme results showed they shared 27% of their DNA. His response was that he didn't have any children old enough to have produced children her age ................ at which she immediately responded that he must be her half-brother.

It turned out that she was right ............. as a result, he discovered that his father was a Cree from one of the largest reserves in that province, and he has since embraced his First Nations background, found a large family, and been accepted by them.

So that is another good story ...................................


but still not enough to persuade me that all is good in the land of DNA testing!

Well, they worked out that me, my sister and my nephew were related!
Not a bit of 'English' in us - we await the call for deportation!
The irony is, my elder brothers were born in Malta and came to the UK on the Windrush (dad was in the Fleet Air Arm)
Younger brother (there's only 13 months between them) applied for a passport in the 1980's, and was refused as he was allegedly, an 'illegal alien'!
Mum had to write a letter explaining that she hadn't registered them when they came back to the UK (other things to think about with a 2 year old and a 1 year old).
I had jet black hair as a child, brown eyes, and was very dark skinned. (Iberian?)
My eldest brother had fair hair, fair skin and blue eyes.(Northern European?)
As I grew up, my skin lightened, though I was still dark enough to be the survivor of a racial attack in my 20's - the 'afro' hairstyle may have been factor - but the racist bar steward came off worst!
I started going grey in my 30's.
With the lightening of hair came the lightening of skin - I am now silver haired,with light skin, but I have a dark 'blob' on the side of my face, near my hairline.
I went to my doctor, thinking it may be a melanoma.
He was quite embarrassed when he asked me if I had ever been 'darker'.
Apparently, this 'blob' is a remnant of my original colouring!
Ummm - I was quite dark, but wear my 'blob' with pride :-D :-D

Edit: I have 2 children - their father is a blue eyed 'ooh a bit of sun and I may burn' (totally huguenot) person.
Our eldest is dark skinned, brown eyed and (randomly) has an Arabic name.
Quite often, doctors at the hospital where she works assume she's Arabic - she has to remind them to speak English!
Younger daughter has blue eyes, pale skin and will burn if the sun is brighter than a lightbulb!

I'm desperately hoping my Maternal Grandpa's offspring will pop up. I would like to know why he abandoned Grandma when she was pregnant. Yes I do know his name thanks to the Samaritans :-D

At least you know his name - my dad never knew the name of his father - even though he asked his mother.
However, having looked at the contenders, (and the DNA) he was probably Cornish, and the man dad thought was his father!

Like RTR says, I do have a great desire to know where I come from.

I know my parents, both were one of 9 siblings. So I have plenty of family. I am blonde and blue eyed as my mum was and is one of my sisters, my dad was dark haired darker skin and brown eyes as do my other 2 sisters and my own children.

I suspect if I do go ahead there will be strong English Irish heritage but I suspect something else I am just curious to know what the other else will be. Lets face it is nothing but curiosity that has brought us all here to this very site in past.

My sister had her DNA testing done recently, interestingly enough it showed no Scottish link at all.......and yet our father was born and bred there as were many generations before him.

There was always a supposition that the darker skin colouring and dark hair of my uncles and ancestors in the Irish line came from " Spanish armada sailors washed up in Ireland" , that's apparently very unlikely. So working further back pretty certain the original ancestors were Norman French over in the 12thC, who possibly originated in Italy, (Gherardinis) I'm mildly interested but probably not enough to have a test, which may not show it anyway.

I'm pretty much with Sylvia on this one. It depends what you're looking for. I don't particularly want to find 'long lost' cousins, I've already found one or two by traditional means and one in particular has been very useful in backing up my own research. Different companies can give different results as to 'where you come from'. I already know I have East European ancestry.

My Mum's eldest sister was (we found out when Gran died and were going through papers) not Grandad's daughter. A long story but one of her sons (my 1st cousin) has been very keen to identify who his Mum's father was. He is very dark-skinned, black hair. He had his DNA tested and has mainly European links so nothing obvious. Another long story, but I did some detective work and identified a possible 'culprit' who had Jersey and Irish roots.

I don't think a DNA test will reveal anything 'new' to me so I haven't bothered!

Modern, recent research has showed that the people who came into Europe after the Neanderthals were dark skinned. All of them. The evolution to a pale skin more able to absorb vitamin D and less concerned with sunburn was fairly rapid. Nevertheless most of us carry the genes which will express a darker skin. In the way that the DNA lottery works it is inevitable that some people will have darker skins for that reason nothing at all to do with recent family or Spanish sailors.

DNA has always existed and it is a sound hypothesis that it is universal. The study and discovery of DNA at Oxford goes back to the 1950s so after nearly 70 years it is hardly in its infancy. Technologies based in DNA have accelerated sharply in the last 20 years. As with most tech there are ups and downs to this. As Ay do not have a clear policy on usage I have not bought their kit.

All the same denying the power of the technology is Luddite.

The vast majority of "Scots" have Saxon origins so that there is nothing from a DNA point of view, to tell them from the English. For those with Celtic and/or Norse DNA it shows up fine.

There is no gene to be Latin, Celt, Saxon, Chinese, Zulu etc. We are all made of the same stuff. Assessments of origin are based on groups of genes which may or may not be expressed in any generation. That has been known since Mendel.

Although it is not intuitive Ay DNA is on firmer ground matching families. UK justice has had success resolving crimes initially through a rellie of the suspect. Hence the reluctance of the Home Office to delete saved DNA samples.

Strange you say that Rose the " Spanish armada sailors washed up in Ireland" story also spread to our family. My mum's parents were blonde and blued eyed so was all her siblings, in fact Nana Mum and myself are very much alike the resemblance is uncanny such as when my Mum was in her last years and latter stages of dementia she often called me Mam. Anyway Rose my Mum told me the very same story Spanish sailors from the Armada. Her maiden name was very unusual.

It's just possible Madge, though it seems likely nearly all sailors who made it ashore were then butchered, the location my ancestors came from on the west coast was an area where ships sank .

How accurate this is I can't say.

"One of the earliest known written records of the Blasket Islands was recently discovered in an archive in Samancas, Spain. The ship’s captain who left the document, dated 1597, referred to the islands as Las Yslas de Blasques and also stated that the inhabitants spoke fluent Spanish. He may have had an encounter with shipwreck survivors or deserters from the 1588 Spanish Armada, contemporary records of which also refer to the islands by various names."

My Ancestry DNA test proved useful in knocking down the brick wall in my traveller ancestry, always difficult because children were all born in different places.

There had been some mystery (only discovered from an aunt after my mother died!) that my mother's father may not have been the man married to my grandmother. From one of my DNA matches I saw there were no matching surnames in the person's family tree, so I set about tracing wives they had not yet found. I eventually found one of their ancestors had married my gt grandfather's sister. So my grandfather was who I had grown up to know as my grandfather.

Certificates don't really prove anything as people don't always tell the truth on them. It would be a scandal if a child was born out of wedlock years ago, so a daughter's child could be brought up and registered as her parent's child. I think DNA is just another useful tool to help confirm or disprove what other evidence there is.

"The vast majority of "Scots" have Saxon origins so that there is nothing from a DNA point of view, to tell them from the English. For those with Celtic and/or Norse DNA it shows up fine."


That'll be it then the DNA is accurate and I have no Northener blood in me at all as it didn't even show Northern England...which is funny because prior to this generation my family both sides were many generations Northern England and Scotland...or...as I like to tease her my sister is adopted :-)

"DNA has always existed and it is a sound hypothesis that it is universal. The study and discovery of DNA at Oxford goes back to the 1950s so after nearly 70 years it is hardly in its infancy. Technologies based in DNA have accelerated sharply in the last 20 years. As with most tech there are ups and downs to this. As Ay do not have a clear policy on usage I have not bought their kit.

All the same denying the power of the technology is Luddite."


I guess I'm now being called a Luddite by the master insulter on these boards.

I do know far more about DNA than you do, Rollo, and without having to go to Wikipedia or other online sources for quotations.

I'm not denying the technology.

I am denying the ability of most of the companies, including Ancestry and FindMyPast, to produce consistent results that will help EVERYONE find what they want to find.

I am concerned about the number of people paying large sums to companies for results that might well be different if that person has the same test done by the same company 6 months later.

I am concerned about the privacy of the results ............ which as we all well know know can be accessed by police forces around the world looking for help in cold cases.

In this latter case, I speak as one who had to provide fingerprints for access to a country, told they would never be released to anyone else, and know now that they were indeed examined by police trying to solve a case.


Luddite??????

Nah

A very well-trained scientist, still well aware of what can be doen and what should NOT be done.

Madge, Ay does give you the results in easy terms but also send you them in more detailed form.

They also re-test as new methods become available and let you have updated results.

Well Sylvia I hold a Masters degree from a world leading uni. and I am quite knowlegable about fingerprints having worked with prints/digital capture and matching since the 1980s. In the context of this thread fingerprints have little to do wth DNA except that DNA can sometimes be extracted from a greasy print. IMHO finerprint evidence is usually shaky in crime scenarios for reasons you are probably aware of. It is somewhat better at security applications though the ease of print replication is a problem.

Analysis of DNA is a potent tool both in health applications and forensice science. I am myself uneasy in the directions being taken by insurance companies and for gene replication and modification. OTOH the restrictions imposed by the EU go much too far in assuaging the Vatican than logic.

DNA for such applications as proof of relationship produces indisputable results. It also costs a lot more than £90!

The Ancestry fee is buttons while the claimed database has obvious limitations even taking the unproven 6 stages of relationship rule. Thus imho it is best taken as more of a home entertainment than a serious genealogy tool. That it has its occasional successes is unsuprising. That Ay do not publish stats on the overall performance of their DNA product is telling.

When the S Wales coalfields were bening developed the population of S Wales was low and mining skills non existent bar addit mining. Thus large numbers of miners were brought in from Chesire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire in particular. Today several generations on the descendants of the original minors very much regard themselves as Welsh. However DNA testing is likely to show them as having English ancestry rather than mythic Welsh Celts. And so on.

To close DNA "matching" is a divertissement at this level not something to get to het up about. People waste thier money on all sorts of things after all.

RTR

Just like to rectify the statement about Welsh miners....not minors!

There were no commercial adit mines....not addit.

Yes when the Steam Coal companies started to expand (including the iron works which supported the industry) recruitment did take place outside of Wales. It is wrong to state that there were not many Welsh miners employed.

As I have been researching the mining families for 5 years I can confidently assert that the majority of miners were born Welsh. Some did indeed come back from wherever they had migrated to during the late 1800s during the expansion period.

Some (the minority) were mining in England and saw an opportunity to move their families to the housing provided by Lord Tredegar and other magnates. I bought one of those houses and am fortunate to have all the original paperwork from the Powell Duffryn Steam Coal Co. Ltd.This lists all the plans, projected rents and the scheme of building works for this parish together with correspondence from the mining agents.

The same plans were duplicated all over South Wales.

There were far more labourers from England who were employed by the railway companies which were hurrying to connect the Valleys to the coast in order to ship the coal.

There are arguments to be made regarding security & you'll all be able to work out what they are without me telling you lol , but for me what it boils down to is that it's a lot of money to waste if you don't then find out what you 'need' to know :-)