DNA Tests Can
This supports your argument.


However I was kidding about changing our décor.


I like the faux snob we have now.

I still dont get it. "Buried in the sand"? More over, not worrying about things that you can not control. As humans (and every other living creature on this planet right down to volcano's)...we are mortal. There will be an end. Now, if we do or do not get a peptic ulcer in waiting for the end is our decision.

A good for instance. I will never get a prostate check. IF a person has prostate cancer it very rarely metastatic. The "resolution" is a life of adult diapers, ****ing ones self and the ability to freebase Viagra with no effects...no thanks...I will take quality over quantity of life any day. If "ignorance is bliss", consider me blissful :MOJE_whot:


I might suggest "The serenity prayer" for those who are hell bent on worrying about such trivialities.


God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

This is a copy of a post I made to a paid-membership Irish genealogy site (at forum.youririshheritage.com) that I am a member of that describes my experience with genealogy-focused DNA testing. The only update to this is that subsequently, I discovered I could upload my ancestry.com DNA raw data to gedmatch.com in order to see if I could find any additional matches in their database. It turned out I did find two 3rd cousins I was previously unaware of (and was able to exchange emails with them). And yes, I do plan to get involved with genealogy groups here in TV sometime.

Here's that post:

To date I have taken two DNA tests, The first was in 2005 via familytreedna.com. I chose that provider because IBM, my employer, was sponsoring a joint project between familytreedna, National Geographic and IBM to advance the science of DNA testing. As employees, we were given the opportunity to participate at a greatly reduced cost (to kick start the project). I had always been interested in my family origins and so I decided to participate.

At the time I had only a vague notion of where my family had come from. My paternal line, the Cronin's, were clearly from Ireland, although details were hazy at best. My maternal line, the Spurr's, were known (with much greater certainty than my paternal line) to have emigrated from Normandy to England around the time of the Norman Conquest, way back in 1066. So I expected to find that I had mostly Irish and English ancestors.

The results on familytreedna are very detailed, so its difficult to provide a succinct summary, but the chart at the following link gives a reasonably good overview of the probabilities based on an analysis of the matches I have with other test takers in their database. As expected, England, UK and Ireland are prevalent (with some France, which makes sense given the Norman origins of my maternal line). I was a bit surprised by the number of German matches at first, but then I remembered that my paternal Grandmother (named Smith, aka Schmitt) was likely from there, so I guess that makes sense as well.

All in all I was satisfied with the results, at least in terms of the confirmation they provided of the general ideas I had about where my ancestors came from. The results were not very useful in narrowing things down to specific areas (e.g. counties, townlands, etc.) , and that was a bit frustrating, but given the vast computational challenges involved (not to mention the relative dearth of detailed test results for any significant percentage of the population), understandable I suppose.

https://goo.gl/77qcMK

I took the second test in 2013, this time with ancestry.com. In the intervening years between my first and second tests, I had gotten more active trying to narrow things down, particularly on my paternal line. I joined ancestry.com and spent a few years researching my Cronin line.

To make a long story short, I traced my Cronin's back from my childhood home in Massachusetts, USA to my great grandfather's birthplace in Johnville, NB Canada and from there back to my 2nd great grandfather in Ireland. I found his baptism record (from Killarney in 1815) but not much else. There I hit a frustrating brick wall (in terms of finding other Irish ancestors anyway, I was able to find a fair number of Canadian and American relatives, some of whom I have communicated with directly, and that was satisfying).

At that point I decided to try one more DNA test to see if maybe I could narrow things down further. However, the results from the ancestry.com test were nowhere near as detailed as what I had found through familytreedna and that was disappointing (although they did confirm the general patterns found earlier, and that was a small comfort). For what its worth, here's what ancestry.com came up with.

https://goo.gl/0FssRt

All in all, my experience was reasonably satisfying in terms of providing a fairly crisp understanding of the general areas my ancestors were from, but beyond that I've not found them particularly useful to get any specifics. Both services did provide a matching service to identify others whose test results were similar to mine, but none of those has turned up any actual direct relatives. So, while it was interesting to see who they were and where they were from, it was not of any use in helping break through my brick wall.

For the moment I've given up on that. I need some kind of breakthrough. I am considering travelling to Ireland and spending some quality time in the general areas I believe my 2nd great grandfather's family to have been from (but even then, given the paucity of records from that time period in Ireland, I'm not particularly hopeful that I'll find much, but at least I'll get to see the area).

I hope this has been useful to you all.
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Bob C

Very cool to read. My question is however, what did the DNA tell you that you could not have found by interviewing family members, friends and doing searches on birth records?

I think that the Internet has been far more key in finding our lineage than what we knew from across the room (your of Euro/Anglo-Saxion decent). Unless your family members also had their DNA recorded and indexed, there was no sample to compare to, such as with a paternity chromosomal test (that is where things get really scary with "Big Brother").

To heck with DNA. Want to find all of your missing relatives, win big in powerball, they will find you. You have more distant relatives than you ever thought possible.:MOJE_whot::1rotfl::clap2::boom:

I'm with you. I don't want to know more than what I've been told. It might explain why I have such good rhythm though?? :duck:

[QUOTE=Record10ti;1213696]You all of course know that you still will not know what it is you do not know? There is no actual scientific basis for the "results" other than going off of a "presumed" sample - that is directly disputed in the commercials for DNA testing. Simply thinking that X=1 is not pertinent in this dog fight because no one even knows what "1" is!

The only thing that the DNA purveyors need now is to have Dion Warwick as their spokes person...being as it is Snake Oil and preying on the people who dont know better.



Damn we and the government spent $250,000 on our oldest education. . .he is a physical anthropologist with DNA back to 4000 BC in Egyptian, Mexico, native Alaskan. He is been the youngest to be published by the Smithsonian at age 23 and then again at age 25. There are a lot of people in his field that he is highly respected in his education and DNA background that it clears up a tremendous amount of issues of bones that of been removed from site and not properly labeled. Guess I'm gonna have to tell him that he's wasting his time doing DNA studies and 14 lectures that he has this summer and the amount of time that the government sends him back-and-forth to Alaska and the UK and Mexico.

I didn't know these companies could supply testing for medical reasons again. I was under the impression they were stopped from doing it because it was considered practicing medicine. I don't remember where I heard or read it. Maybe they are now doing that.

My friends all know I dont golf...and they want to come and golf....

Regrettably I have no living family members to interview. I wish I'd gotten interested in the subject earlier. As to DNA, you're right, in my case it added very little extra information. Just a few 3rd cousins I was formerly unaware of. Most of the rest of what I learned came from websites like ancestry.
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Bob C

That is sorta what I figured. Money wasted? Certainly not - but, it did not offer the things that the claims "claim", such as "I found my great grandmother who was on a flight to Tallahassee and hooked up in the bathroom" - not ging to happen until the point that we have genomes from every human on earth (and a suspect to compare things to).

That is awesome you can find folks - for me, I try to avoid the family ;-)

LOL!!!! That's a great one, and true too!

I don't need a DNA test. My Mother told me I have royalty in my blood because she always said I was a royal pain in the ass!

When I have visited Sweden and Germany, even when I was among a group of Americans speaking English among ourselves, locals almost always addressed me in their native tongues.

When I visited Minnesota people thought I was a local which I am not.

Physical appearance apparently says a lot.