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That DNA Thing 2021

kcmets Feb 05 2021 12:45 PM

Got another periodic update as the database changes and grows... Ethnicity Estimate: Germanic Europe 25% England & Northwestern Europe 21% Baltics 20% Scotland 13% Eastern Europe & Russia 9% Sweden 9% Ireland 3% Additional Communities: Early Connecticut & New York Settlers From your regions: England & Northwestern Europe; Germanic Europe; Scotland Eastern New York & Connecticut Settlers Northern Mid-Atlantic Settlers From your regions: England & Northwestern Europe; Germanic Europe; Scotland Southern New York & Northern Pennsylvania & New Jersey Settlers Japan (First time this has shown up, I really think so!) Bottom line, I am pure 100% American MUTT.

Edgy MD Feb 05 2021 12:50 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

I figure, if you're really 20% Baltics-ese, there's a meaningful chance Centerfield is your father.

kcmets Feb 05 2021 01:04 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

My great grandmother came to NYC from Lithuania in the early 1900's. I think CF did his bangin' in another Baltic country.

Willets Point Feb 05 2021 01:21 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Edgy MD wrote: I figure, if you're really 20% Baltics-ese, there's a meaningful chance Centerfield is your father. This is a great callback.

Lefty Specialist Feb 05 2021 02:55 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Will not get one of these. I prefer not to be in a government DNA database.

kcmets Feb 05 2021 03:28 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Are companies like Ancestry DNA in cahoots with the gubment?

Lefty Specialist Feb 05 2021 06:19 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

=kcmets post_id=55543 time=1612564082 user_id=53] Are companies like Ancestry DNA in cahoots with the gubment?

Yes. They're required to supply any and all information to authorities who ask for it. From their privacy statement:



If we are compelled to disclose your Personal Information to law enforcement, we will do our best to provide you with advance notice, unless we are prohibited under the law from doing so.

Edgy MD Feb 05 2021 07:15 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

My brother-in-law spent twenty minutes trying to convince me how meaningful the testing he and my sister got was. He told me it would be really worth the investment if I submitted a swab. I asked to see my sister's and he asked why. I told him that I was pretty sure I was the same percentage Irish and Iroquois and Bavaraian and Kangaroo that she is.

kcmets Feb 05 2021 07:18 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

I'm not too worried about requests from law enforcement. I've been arrested, mugshot and fingerprinted so I'm already in the big data base on some level. I'm not being flippant. I donate blood and give the doctor's office samples of blood, urine and stool. Our DNA is out there. Read recently China is collecting it for god knows what.

Edgy MD Feb 05 2021 07:19 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Hey, they caught the Golden State Killer that way.

kcmets Feb 05 2021 07:51 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Don't plan on killing anyone anytime soon.

Lefty Specialist Feb 06 2021 08:08 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

To each his own. I'll keep my DNA as private as I can, even if the Chinese come knocking. I've got a pretty good idea where my ancestors come from; I don't need to know if I'm 3% Bulgarian. And they caught the Golden State killer not by his DNA, but by the DNA of a relative that was in the database. So while you may not mind, some of your blood relatives might.

kcmets Feb 06 2021 01:11 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Lefty Specialist wrote: To each his own. I'll keep my DNA as private as I can, even if the Chinese come knocking. I've got a pretty good idea where my ancestors come from; I don't need to know if I'm 3% Bulgarian. Of course to each his own. Always, in all things. I used to not care so much about my upbringing and heritage until now later in life for some reason. I always knew my Mom was German and Lithuanian but my birth father (who abandoned us) left me no clues plus he was adopted so he may not have known much anyway. So the English, Scottish and Sweden thing vs Irish is interesting to me. It's also interesting that his side of the family has likely been here since the 1600's. Also, just from a few things I found out as an adult it's very likely I have step brothers/ sisters. I don't have time or the energy to go seeking out that info, but if someone were to contact me I'd certainly take that phone call or answer an email. I have no family, so it would be ironic or whatever if at some point I found out I have cousins or nieces or nephews. And the Japan thing just blows my mind lol...

kcmets Feb 06 2021 01:24 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

I mean half brothers/sisters, not step.

Chad ochoseis Feb 13 2021 09:27 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Catching up on posting. I'm in the non baseball forum because at this point I have no memories of any Mets at all. I gave my DNA to one of the ancestry tracing companies. I was curious - my mother always had this story that we were descended from a relative of Peter the Great who converted to Judaism. I always figured it was nonsense, but I thought I'd check it out. Also, I have a lot of very blond, blue-eyed non-Semitic looking relatives, so I thought maybe I had some degree of mixed ancestry. Nope, I'm Ashkenazi Jewish, all the way back. I did find in an older second cousin who had been close with my mother when they were growing up in the Bronx. She's in SoCal and my mom was only a few hours away in Phoenix, so they were able to get together once before my mom died. Also, my dad had a cousin who was a sperm donor in the sixties and fathered (at last count) 49 kids, one of whom found me on 23andMe. I've since met a couple of them, and they're good people. One has a business making acoustic guitars by hand, so if you've got a few zillion dollars to drop on a custom guitar, I'll hook you up.

kcmets Sep 29 2021 07:32 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

=kcmets post_id=55506 time=1612554316 user_id=53] Got another periodic update as the database changes and grows... Ethnicity Estimate: Germanic Europe 25% England & Northwestern Europe 21% Baltics 20% Scotland 13% Eastern Europe & Russia 9% Sweden 9% Ireland 3%

Got another update this week with a dramatic swing towards Sweden and

Denmark. Puzzling what new data or whatever else is going on that things

have changed so much.



Sweden Denmark 22%

Baltics 21%

Germanic Europe 21%

Scotland 16%

England & Northwestern Europe 15%

Ireland 3%

Eastern Europe & Russia 2%

Ceetar Sep 29 2021 08:37 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

yeah, it's not the ancestry that's a "government tracking/control" issue, it'd be the medical stuff. The Ancestry stuff is interesting, I don't fully understand how it all works and changes, but a lot of it is fairly arbitrary. As I understand it, it's mostly linking common relatives, way back when, and the pool of that is much much smaller. But with more data downstream I think they're able to adjust which percentages are going down which branches. So like, if a fourth cousin of yours joins, and they can tell because of one stretch of DNA, but the percentage breakdowns don't match up, they adjust. Like, if your 4th cousin was NOT 22% Sweden/Denmark, but they thought most of your Sweden/Denmark was coming from that mutual ancestor, the algorithm readjusts. Some things are broadly associated, and I guess with more data they're able to isolate specific strings. Plus they don't always know which parent you got it from. And the initial 'reference populations' they use, are variously diluted. 'Icelandic' is a lot easier than most of Europe where all the population groups interbreed for centuries. I wonder what the actual error bars are on these things. I've broadly swung form like 55%->75% Southern Italian. (Campania + 7 regions. 68.6% currently. Says 'highly likely match') 23andme says they're calculated at a 50% confidence level actually.. So like, I come up as 6.6% west asian/north african, and it seems like 3.2% of that is iranian/caucasian and mesopotamian, but they don't have the data pool to isolate that to Armenia or George or Turkey or anything like that with any real confidence. I imagine all the stuff around the Mediterranean is a mess. Sailors mating with people across the sea, and then those kids cross the sea and mixing with someone else entirely. How do you isolate 'Italian' and is that even a meaningful word? It's fascinating to me. Also I've got a couple of relatives that ping a little closer to me than they actually "are" because my Grandmother was a twin. So I share 29 segments with my father's cousin, but only 24 with my mother's cousin.

MFS62 Sep 29 2021 09:04 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Never had it checked. You can't really tell because we escaped many countries before coming here. Basically 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, but the countries differ widely. Family lore going back three or four generations indicates my father's family was from Romania and my mother's family was from Lithuania. But my father's last name is a town in Austria (near the Italian border), so who knows? Later

Fman99 Sep 29 2021 09:24 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Look near my PC keyboard, I bet you find tons of DNA

kcmets Sep 29 2021 09:46 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

=Ceetar post_id=78849 time=1632926264 user_id=102]It's fascinating to me.

Me too, and thanks for sharing with a good informative post.

kcmets Sep 29 2021 09:53 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

=MFS62 post_id=78851 time=1632927846 user_id=60]But my father's last name is a town in Austria (near the Italian border), so who knows?

My Mom's last name is a borough of a city in Germany. I've collected a number

of online images and it looks quite nice. It's funny, but it's really quite like what

any suburban NYC town might look like.

kcmets Sep 29 2021 09:55 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

=Fman99 post_id=78852 time=1632929098 user_id=86]Look near my PC keyboard, I bet you find tons of DNA

We'll take your word for it.

Edgy MD Sep 29 2021 10:24 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Wait, so you're growing less Japanese?

Frayed Knot Sep 29 2021 02:15 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

=kcmets post_id=55586 time=1612642276 user_id=53] It's also interesting that [birth father's] side of the family has likely been here since the 1600's.

That's not what they mean by that. I mean, it certainly is what they want to imply by it because such connections make these discoveries sound a lot cooler. But they have no way of knowing such

things merely from your DNA sample.

Basically what they are able to say is that your sample shows enough markers to project that it's X% likely that your heritage is from a certain region. Then, because they know where you now live,

they throw in that your current area had immigrants from that region starting in the 17th century even though they have no idea whether your specific ancestors were among that group. Your DNA

would be no different if your forebears had arrived in the 16th century, the 18th, the 20th, or a week ago last Tuesday.

kcmets Sep 29 2021 02:30 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

They updated that too. Now it's 1700-1775. Maybe by 2025 we'll be up to last Tuesday. I realize there's some malarkey to it all but I find it fun and interesting.

Frayed Knot Sep 29 2021 02:44 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Not ragging on it because it certainly can be fun and interesting. Hell, I had grandparents that were obsessed with this sort of stuff way back before Al Gore even invented the internet. They put whatever documents or evidence they found into leather bound books. And it's not really malarkey so much as it is just too general to take any potential projection from it as stone cold fact. The region they're giving you is probably accurate and, if so, the mid-Atlantic coast on this side of the ocean certainly did get to start getting populated by folks from that region way back when. That all makes it possible that your ancestors were among them, just don't mistake 'possible' for 'likely'.

kcmets Sep 29 2021 04:45 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Another thing that's odd that I didn't think about until discussing with someone... why is Scotland 16% and England & Northwestern Europe 15% separated? That's a solid 30%.

Frayed Knot Sep 29 2021 05:51 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

=kcmets post_id=78877 time=1632955539 user_id=53] .. why is Scotland 16% and England & Northwestern Europe 15% separated?

There are relatively few Scotsman (<7 million, or under 10% of the U.K. despite occupying around 1/3 of the land) and they've been relatively isolated for much of their history even from

their southerly neighbors on the same island (often intentionally and hostilely so).

The English, on the other hand, are much more Mutt-ish as they're the product of being visited/invaded by the Romans (around the time of Christ), various Germanic tribes, most notably the

Angles & Saxons from the areas including present day Netherlands, NW Germany and southern Denmark starting around 500 CE (or AD if you prefer), Vikings from the coastal area of modern

Norway circa 800-ish, from Gaul/France (11th century) and others. Those folks came and they stayed and they intermingled with the locals but usually not with those redheads up north.



So the point is that Scottish DNA would have stayed more unique and therefore more identifiable and traceable even today while there's less to distinguish the genetics of the English from those

in [draw a circle around much of NW Europe] so those necessarily tend to get lumped together.

kcmets Sep 30 2021 06:15 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Yes, thanks. I found a rather large explanation of why there are four distinct regions instead of two. Your post is easier to get through than what I found lol. It used to be roughly an Ireland/Celtic/Gaelic group and an Anglo-Saxon/ Britain/England group. Now it's England & Northwestern Europe, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. -------------------------- Why Your Latest Results Could Include More Scotland In Your Ethnicity Estimates

Edgy MD Sep 30 2021 08:24 AM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Yeah, the Picts to the West and the Persians to the East were the two peoples that Rome could never quite crack, and those frontiers remained stable throughout the centuries.

Frayed Knot Sep 30 2021 06:34 PM Re: That DNA Thing 2021

Turned back in part because of the tough Scottish terrain and the tough Scottish weather. But also the Romans also thought of the Scots as a bunch of red-haired savages and wanted nothing to do with them. All of which led Roman leader Hadrian to coin his famous slogan, "Build that Wall!, Build that Wall!"