I Did The Thing After All

"Well, I did it."

"Did what?" my questing buddy asked.

"I sent in a sample to Ancestry."

"Ooo! You will have to tell me how it goes!"

"I got the results today."

"And?"

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? The desire to fill in gaps, to figure out --in a nation of immigrants-- where we came from, and to answer family questions that have been left hanging: all of that were an impetus to deciding to get my DNA sequenced. 

I'd covered that in my What on Earth is Red Reading This Time post about The Lost Family, so why did I finally decide to pull the trigger now?

Part of it was that there was a sale. (Well, duh.) I know enough that waiting means sales, and I figure that if I waited long enough the price point would drop to a level that I'd be able to justify. If I wanted to.

The second part that went into my decision was that I wanted to be proactive about what might happen. I could simply wait around and then have somebody chase me down at a random time in the future, but instead I decided to test now so I had that already finished.

The last part was the Ancestry option to have your results hidden from other matches. If I were forced into having any potential matches visible as the only option, I'd never consider conducting the test. However, since I could keep my results "private" so that I would remain hidden from any potential matches until I decided to open it up, I became more comfortable with the process. 

Kind of ironic, perhaps, that I'm discussing this here in a publicly available blog. 

There's more to it than that, of course, because just showing some charts aren't going to make someone say "Hey, I'm related to that guy!"

I mean, have you any idea just how many people of German descent are there in the Ohio River Valley?

A ton.

Now, given that my wife's ancestry is 100% German American, it would be far more an interesting event if she were to show up as not being the same. Alas for me, things are not that simple.

Here's what I mean:

If you need to click on the graphic to see it
better, go ahead. No worries.

The first thing I noticed, even before the graphic, was the Ethnicity Update indicating that Ancestry is able to identify people from 4 regions (3 in Asia, 1 in Europe), and provide better matches in Hawaii and New Zealand. This means that as Ancestry gets more data from people who test, they are able to more accurately assign DNA to geographical areas than before. Of course, that's also dependent upon the accuracy of the person providing the DNA sample, because any inaccuracy there will require even more data to remediate.

That's fancy terminology for a pretty basic premise: every person who lied about or unintentionally misrepresented certain things when providing your DNA sample turns their data point into an outlier. Ancestry would need to compensate for those outliers with more and more data about a specific region to obtain a more accurate understanding of the regions affected. So, if you were told that you came from, say, Fiji, but it turns out that your ancestors were really from New Zealand, that inaccuracy will show up in the data. If there aren't enough samples from Fiji to distinguish you as an outlier, Ancestry's results will be broader than you might expect. 

Ancestry does couch their findings in fuzzy language, because those inaccuracies will change over time. The header "Your DNA looks most like the DNA from these 8 world regions" is the first real kicker that hey, this is what we know now, but check back in a bit and this might change. There was nothing I did to change my DNA*, it's just that this is what Ancestry can safely say at the moment.

But hey, let's have some fun, shall we? Here's what happens when I click on Germanic Europe:

Well, that's actually... okay, I think I understand this.

See that dark green section up in the northwest part of the map? Before you think that's where my German ancestry is from --ironically enough, some of it might be, but that's neither here nor there-- the color hues represent the potential percentage of your ancestry hails from. So ancestors form the dark green area have potentially 75% or more Germanic Europe ancestry. The middle area is in the 50% range, and the light green area is 25%. If I were like my wife, who is German American on both sides of her family, Ancestry could likely even delve down further into the region and be more specific about where her ancestors came from. Me, having significantly less of a match at 30% --and split between both parents-- doesn't have such a luxury.

***

Okay, one thing you might have missed is the ethnicity estimate.

There's a lot of variability there, given that while the median estimate for Germanic Europe is 30%, the range is 24 - 56%. There is a white paper on this process, so if you're thinking it's a simple standard deviation.... eh, it's not. The TL;DR on this is that the more data Ancestry can get that they can use as representative samples, the more precise results they can achieve. Even so, there are limitations due to natural regional variations. 

Variations aside, there were a few surprises in the results. Not "OMG YOU'RE ACTUALLY FROM ANOTHER PART OF THE GLOBE!" sort of surprise, but more along the lines of "Huh, I didn't expect that to pop up in there."

Like that slight amount of Slavic ancestry that centered around Poland and Ukraine.

Or the Norse and Swedish/Danish ancestry.

And while I expected Irish, I didn't expect that much of it. Or Scottish at all.

Still, the one thing that made me raise an eyebrow was this, a little bit lower on the results page:

That date range made me go ????

I mean, I understand that my ancestors had to settle somewhere, but I wasn't expecting it to be Pennsylvania. Or potentially that early. 

From what I've been able to tell, the farther back the date range goes, the farther back the community originated. So instead of looking at the range and saying "yeah, THAT helps a hell of a lot," it's the earliest part of the date range that is the most relevant. 

So... that some of my ancestors could have been over here in North America before the American War of Independence is... well, unexpected. You think German and Irish ancestry, your American brain goes "Oh, the 1840s: the civil unrest in what is now known as Germany and the potato famine in Ireland." Both groups migrated to the Ohio River Valley --far more Germans than Irish, to be fair-- but that doesn't surprise me much at all. But seeing that "Early Pennsylvania Settlers" with an early date of 1700 pop up and... okay, I might have to rethink some of what my family's past was like.

***

"Never say never, but never... Okay?"

--Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, when asked if he was interested in coaching a college football team

One thing that I can put to bed is the family story about having a Native American ancestor. As you can see, it doesn't show up at all. That doesn't mean it might show up sometime in the future given enough data points --and said Early Pennsylvania Settlers community-- but to put it politely, the future does not look bright for that piece of family lore.

***

Now that we have some of the general stuff put out there, let's delve into inheritance, shall we?

They were originally Parent 1 and Parent 2
until I assigned which was which.

The DNA test can identify which parent each set of ethnicities came from, as seen above. Ancestry does not identify which parent was which --that was my job based on what I knew of family history-- but they can tell you that Parent 1 provided you with such and such genes, and Parent 2 provided me with other sets of genes.

To go into more detail, and to make it blindingly obvious that Ethnicity inheritance is random, here's the other half of that comparison:

Given some of the family names on my Mom's
side of the tree, I'm amused at how little German
I inherited from her.

I'd figured that the "mutt" side of the family was the unknown part, on my Dad's side, but since I knew for certain that French was on my mom's side, that's the side I identified as hers. That there's so much English in there on both sides of the family was kind of a surprise to me.

But you know, as Ancestry points out, ethnicities are passed down unevenly. Sometimes an ancestry breeds true in a family as well. My mom is the only one of her siblings with her particular hair color, and even among the mini-Reds you can tell the different variations in the red hair color and identify which side of the family they got their particular shade of red from. 

---Begin Rant---

One thing I want to stress about this exercise is that some people will read a certain amount of superiority into their results, but they should absolutely not do that. I really don't give a fuck about the reason why you took a DNA test or are interested in your ancestry, but I'm here to tell you that people are people. We are all equal, and nobody is genetically superior to another person.

---End rant---

***

Oh yeah, one final part of Ancestry's results that I could observe within the limitations I set is this:

Oh, THIS could be fun...

I wasn't exactly sure what to make of this, since we're delving into territory that could easily go toward the nature vs. nurture argument. 

While I won't show too much stuff, I'll show a few items here. Mainly because I was amused by them:

Oh, they SO do not know me on some of these...

The first one, Dancing, had me laughing. I have what is known as "two left feet". I SUCK at dancing. However, this trait was pointed as coming from my Dad's side, which is actually quite accurate: he was a really good dancer. I can appreciate dance, but actually dancing? Eh, no.

Some of these have an obvious genetic tint to them, such as Asparagus odor (which I can smell a mile away**) or Cilantro aversion. As far as birth weight goes, I was kind of average; IIRC I wasn't a jumbo kid, or my mom would never let me hear the end of it. 

My caffeine addiction... Let me tell you about my caffeine addiction...

All I can say is that genetics are not destiny.

***

You might have noticed in perusing these results that there's a LOT of incentive to open up your results and share them with other people.

I look at that and go, "Yeah, right."

I'll do it when I'm good and ready, and I am most definitely not ready at this point in time. 

All of the above may provide a bit of insight into myself and my history, but in the end it's nothing that terribly exciting. That's why I posted as much as I have about the results: there's a lot there, but nothing that could distinguish me from a ton of other people from the Ohio River Valley. It's in the family tree itself where any drama might appear, and that is a long, ongoing process.

*Crispr notwithstanding. And to be fair, that old SF/F trope of genetic manipulation for fun and profit has gotten that much closer with the advent of Crispr.

**It doesn't stop me from eating asparagus, however. I just have to hold my nose when I pee later.

EtA: Lost the last part of the last sentence. Have no idea where it vanished to, but I restored it.