Anna and the M Kids Pt 9: M5 Expected

[singsingsing]

My biggest pet peeve in the genetic genealogy community (and I realize having a genetic genealogy pet peeve makes me a gigantic geek) is white people who are devastated, shocked, or enraged when their DNA test comes back with 0% Native American, and then desperately try to find some way to explain it away. "Could this 2% Finnish really be 20% Native American?" "Does Native American ever show up as Middle Eastern?" "Oh, I know, the tests just can't pick it up because not enough Native Americans have tested!" "If I run my raw results through this other website's tools and it finds 0.57% Siberian, it must mean the stories were true!" No. No. No. And no. Guess what? You're white. Your ancestors were white. Great-Grandma was not a 'full-blooded Cherokee Indian'. Get over it. And maybe examine why you so strongly believe that for some reason you are owed Native American DNA.

An "interesting" side note is that I never see people reacting like this about lack of African DNA, even though if you're an American, especially from a certain region, you are substantially more likely to have African rather than Native American ancestors. 

[clueliss]

I might be a bit in lurve with @singsingsing right now.  Dr. Henry Louis Gates on Finding Your Roots pans the x times great grandmother Cherokee princess story all the time.  

[singsingsing]

2 minutes ago, clueliss said:

I might be a bit in lurve with @singsingsing right now.  Dr. Henry Louis Gates on Finding Your Roots pans the x times great grandmother Cherokee princess story all the time.  

I've never watched that, but now I just might have to!

[JordynDarby5]

1 hour ago, Coy Koi said:

How similar were yours and your brother's results? My sister did an Ancestry.com test, so I don't know if it would be worth it for me to do one as well. She didn't really have any surprises. The Native American ancestry my dad's side pretended to have was apparently a myth, but I guess that's par for the course. The Jewish ancestry my mom's side thought they might have didn't show up either. Her results were all European except a chance of a tiny amount of Middle Eastern ancestry (which we'd never heard a word of from anyone). I always think about doing one of these tests but it would probably be more interesting to do it for my daughter, since she is multiracial and not much is known about her paternal grandfather's ancestry. He's African American but her dad claims he's part Chinese (and they do have Asian-looking eyes), but you never know. He claims a lot of questionable things as facts.

They were the same. We both were 33% Europe West, 30% Scandinavia, 16% Ireland, 7% Great Britain, 5% Iberian Peninsula, 5% Finland/Northwest Russia, and4% Europe East.  I do admit we were both surprised that there was no hits on Native American ancestry. On my mother's side her paternal grandfather's mother was always thought be Native American through her mother.  I regret that time ran out before our mom could be tested. It would have been cool to see what came up on her. We might try and talk our dad into taking the test. He's the Scandinavia, Sweden and Norway. And our guess that he's probably were the Finland/Northwest Russia comes in. It would be a big surprise if anything else came up. His paternal side was straight up Swedish and his mother's was Norwegian.

[Gobbles]

I always thought US people were joking when they told me that they are XX% German.  I had no idea that testing like this is apparently a huge thing in the US. 

[justmy2cents]

56 minutes ago, JordynDarby5 said:

They were the same. We both were 33% Europe West, 30% Scandinavia, 16% Ireland, 7% Great Britain, 5% Iberian Peninsula, 5% Finland/Northwest Russia, and4% Europe East. 

I read an article by a woman who took the test along with her 3 sisters and they all got different percentages of the same regions. Wonder how common it is to get the same exact results like you and your brother got? My sister will be doing hers soon so we'll be able to compare in a few months.  By the way, how can you tell how far back your dna results go?  Would you just assume that 12% goes back say 3 generations?

[ViolaSebastian]

1 hour ago, clueliss said:

I might be a bit in lurve with @singsingsing right now.  Dr. Henry Louis Gates on Finding Your Roots pans the x times great grandmother Cherokee princess story all the time.  

It was common in the 19th century to lie about one's African heritage to get around the miscegenation laws in the U.S. African-Americans couldn't marry whites, but people of Native American descent could. Whenever someone claims to be part Cherokee (and here in the south, to always Cherokee because some fought for the Confederacy ) I'm always like:

Spoiler

 

[melon]

On 3/18/2017 at 11:55 PM, Stephanie66 said:

Are we guessing names yet? Matthew? Micah is probably too close to Michael. 

Jana,Joy-Anna and Johannah are similar,and Joseph,Josiah, and Josie.They seriously could have picked different names.One of my son's has a J name and said they should have picked his name...lol.

And I saw an old episode when Michelle was expecting Jordyn,and they were deciding on names...I saw the list...one was "Jessalyn".

For M5 ,I think Matthew,Mason, Miles.

[WhoompThereItIs]

1 hour ago, clueliss said:

I might be a bit in lurve with @singsingsing right now.  Dr. Henry Louis Gates on Finding Your Roots pans the x times great grandmother Cherokee princess story all the time.  

Says every African-American 

Even though her ancestry DNA results say she is 0% native american, my mom still insists her grandmother was part Seminole - "she was light-skinned and had long straight hair!"

[scoutsadie]

30 minutes ago, justmy2cents said:

I read an article by a woman who took the test along with her 3 sisters and they all got different percentages of the same regions. Wonder how common it is to get the same exact results like you and your brother got? My sister will be doing hers soon so we'll be able to compare in a few months.  By the way, how can you tell how far back your dna results go?  Would you just assume that 12% goes back say 3 generations?

Take a look at the Ancestry DNA site - they have articles explaining the sibling percentages. 

Ancestry showed a 2% difference in my British DNA (79%) versus my identical twin sister's 81% British... which makes me mad since I'm the bigger Anglophile.

(So I figure their margin of error is at least 2%, because close comparison at our genetic profiles shows a 100% match...Sorry, forgetting the terminology, but I downloaded our results into RawDNA and did the side-by-side comparison. Results show either an identical twin or the same profile compared to itself.)

23&Me tells you in what time period/generation your ancestry stuff happened - my 2% West African came about during US colonial times (sadly, when I had a lot of slave-owning ancestors in the South).

[justmy2cents]

@scoutsadie wow, a difference in identical twins? That I wouldn't expect. The article I read had one sister with 22% British DNA and another at 32% with the other 2 sisters in between. Large differences I think. There is a percentage of error so if you see 2% for a region is it definite that you have an ancestor from that region? It's been fun looking at my parents results but I'm left with more questions than answers.

[JordynDarby5]

I'm glad to learn that 23&Me works. I'm going to have to try it out. Has anyone tried AncestryDNA  and 23&Me? If so how close were the results?

[elvirajane]

15 minutes ago, WhoompThereItIs said:

Even though her ancestry DNA results say she is 0% native american, my mom still insists her grandmother was part Seminole - "she was light-skinned and had long straight hair!"

It might be that she just did not inherit the native american genes. You only inherit 50% of genes of each of your parents, and genes can get lost after that.

As a genetics graduate, I refuse to get tested through any commercial test. Most of the stuff they offer is just unscientific BS. l will probably get tested for genetic diseases since me and my SO are part of the same ethnicity, but that is all. 

[scoutsadie]

6 minutes ago, justmy2cents said:

@scoutsadie wow, a difference in identical twins? That I wouldn't expect. The article I read had one sister with 22% British DNA and another at 32% with the other 2 sisters in between. Large differences I think. There is a percentage of error so if you see 2% for a region is it definite that you have an ancestor from that region? It's been fun looking at my parents results but I'm left with more questions than answers.

Ha, no, we have identical DNA, so it just confirms that the test has a slight margin of error. Definitely take a look at the articles about sibs on Ancestry - will help explain how there can be big differences (except in identical twins ).

[ViolaSebastian]

My (very racist) aunt had 23 and me done. Came out 40% Irish and 2% West African. Man, the Thanksgiving after she found out was AMAZING. 

[scoutsadie]

9 minutes ago, JordynDarby5 said:

I'm glad to learn that 23&Me works. I'm going to have to try it out. Has anyone tried AncestryDNA  and 23&Me? If so how close were the results?

I found the two to be quite close (single digit differences, if I recall).

[MargaretElliott]

I just don't want to send out my DNA. It's not that I think the government is going to do anything bad with it (they could easily get my DNA if they really wanted to), but it just feels... weird. To me. I am definitely curious though.

Whenever I hear about a Cherokee princess, I'm skeptical, because if everyone who said that was telling the truth, that's a lot of princesses. My great-grandmother was a grumpy Mi'kmaq woman in a homemade wheelchair. My grandmother brought all her kids back to the reservation once every year. No princesses. No warriors. Just a bunch of heavy-drinking Catholics. If your family is boring and unromantic, it's more likely to be true sometimes 

[Carm_88]

16 minutes ago, elvirajane said:

It might be that she just did not inherit the native american genes. You only inherit 50% of genes of each of your parents, and genes can get lost after that.

As a genetics graduate, I refuse to get tested through any commercial test. Most of the stuff they offer is just unscientific BS. l will probably get tested for genetic diseases since me and my SO are part of the same ethnicity, but that is all. 

The other solution is that it's just family lore. It seems that most people in the US have Native American DNA. 

[Jilli]

thats true. My family believed we were part of the Ojibwe tribe and now apparently it's not. Still debatable on who you ask in the family. I'm open to either possibility.

[melon]

My ex-SIL traced the family tree on both sides of the family.

This is not something I am proud of,but my ancestors were slave owners.I am white.I have ancestors who were African American.You'd never know it looking at me.I have very fair skin,blue-green eyes and,before I started going grey,dark-blonde hair.I was not offended to learn this.My racist brother was,he refuses to believe it.Another brother refuses to believe that we are related to JFK ,through,his mother,Rose.He said well they came from Ireland.Well so did this person we are related to through Rose Fitzgerald.He refuses to believe it,too.

My father's side of the family has been here a long time.I have ancestors that went to Leiden,Holland,before they sailed for Plymouth.One was on the Mayflower,an indentured servant,and died the first winter.

[singsingsing]

1 hour ago, scoutsadie said:

Ancestry showed a 2% difference in my British DNA (79%) versus my identical twin sister's 81% British... which makes me mad since I'm the bigger Anglophile.

You'd expect regular siblings to show differences in their ethnicity breakdown, because you inherit different genes from your parents. Differences between identical twins would definitely be down to the margin of error. There will always be at least a slight margin of error with the ethnicity stuff, because it's very far from an exact science (especially when it comes to differences between Western European populations).

1 hour ago, elvirajane said:

It might be that she just did not inherit the native american genes. You only inherit 50% of genes of each of your parents, and genes can get lost after that.

As a genetics graduate, I refuse to get tested through any commercial test. Most of the stuff they offer is just unscientific BS. l will probably get tested for genetic diseases since me and my SO are part of the same ethnicity, but that is all. 

As a genetics graduate, I'm sure you know that if her grandmother really had substantial Native American DNA, she would have inherited some of it. Her grandmother would have had to have had a very low percentage of Native American DNA, certainly too low to express itself in her phenotype, to have not passed on any at all to her granddaughter.

The tests they offer these days are far from unscientific BS, as long as you understand what you're getting out of them. If you're expecting total accuracy and exact breakdowns, you'll be disappointed. If you're expecting a fun breakdown based on our current knowledge, understanding that it's difficult to distinguish between some populations, that the science is going to advance in the future, and that having, say, '12% Italian DNA' doesn't necessarily literally mean you had one great-grandparent who was Italian, I've found that they're very accurate.

I will say that I'm not a fan of the medical aspect of the 23&Me test. I think if you have any real genetic concerns you should go to an actual geneticist. You most definitely should not attempt to interpret your medical results from 23&Me on your own, and especially not google some scary gene it tells you that you have, because I guarantee you what you'll get is hysterical people and naturopathic quacks assuring them they're 100% going to die from everything unless they buy their overpriced and dubious supplements/toxin cleansing saunas.

[Georgiana]

12 minutes ago, elvirajane said:

It might be that she just did not inherit the native american genes. You only inherit 50% of genes of each of your parents, and genes can get lost after that.

As a genetics graduate, I refuse to get tested through any commercial test. Most of the stuff they offer is just unscientific BS. l will probably get tested for genetic diseases since me and my SO are part of the same ethnicity, but that is all. 

Si!  This is why I look more along the Native side and my cousin has natural platinum blonde hair.  Different sides of the genome.

Also, the Seminole tribe accepted many free blacks into their tribe as fully fledged tribal members.  Someone could be 100% of African DNA but still a Seminole in a very real way.  

In my opinion, blood quotas in ANY form are a harmful remnant of colonialism designed to weaken, destabilize, and undermine traditional Native American culture, relationships, and tribal structures.  That's NOT how our concept of self worked AT ALL before contact.  Your tribe was who you belonged to, who you lived along side, and how you lived your life.  It never mattered where you came from.  The American South and the "Five Civilized Tribes" were MARKED by mixed marriages.  If you were a white orphan who was adopted by your uncle and his Muskogee wife, raised Muskogee alongside your cousins, and identified as Muskogee, it was white society that was going to call you white...not the Muskogee.  It actually makes sorting through documentation a nightmare sometimes, and there are MANY people who it is impossible to determine how much, if any, Native blood they had.  I have an ancestor who is well documented, but we have no idea if he was fully white or partially white.  He married a Muskogee woman, lived with the tribe, and was fully considered a tribal member.  

[Snarkle Motion]

2 hours ago, singsingsing said:

My biggest pet peeve in the genetic genealogy community (and I realize having a genetic genealogy pet peeve makes me a gigantic geek) is white people who are devastated, shocked, or enraged when their DNA test comes back with 0% Native American, and then desperately try to find some way to explain it away. "Could this 2% Finnish really be 20% Native American?" "Does Native American ever show up as Middle Eastern?" "Oh, I know, the tests just can't pick it up because not enough Native Americans have tested!" "If I run my raw results through this other website's tools and it finds 0.57% Siberian, it must mean the stories were true!" No. No. No. And no. Guess what? You're white. Your ancestors were white. Great-Grandma was not a 'full-blooded Cherokee Indian'. Get over it. And maybe examine why you so strongly believe that for some reason you are owed Native American DNA.

An "interesting" side note is that I never see people reacting like this about lack of African DNA, even though if you're an American, especially from a certain region, you are substantially more likely to have African rather than Native American ancestors. 

Can you explain the reverse to me? I came out with essentially under 1 percent Native American. Which makes no sense to me since my ancestors shouldn't have been around long enough for such a small percentage. Is this error? Is this from before the land bridge? 

[singsingsing]

Just now, Snarkle Motion said:

Can you explain the reverse to me? I came out with essentially under 1 percent Native American. Which makes no sense to me since my ancestors shouldn't have been around long enough for such a small percentage. Is this error? Is this from before the land bridge? 

It could be an error. It could be that you have an ancestor you don't know about who was around long enough for that kind of percentage. If you have any Asian heritage, it could be misinterpreting that as Native American. I've also heard of some Scandinavians showing tiny percentages of Native American, possibly because of a Siberian ancestor. At that kind of percentage, though, it's really anyone's guess.

[MayMay1123]

so does the 23andme test show if someone has a specific medical gene (i'm asking specifically if it shows a cf gene)? when daughter found she had the gene and son in law did a blood test to see if he had it, it cost $800...23andme is certainly cheaper.