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Trobador222 wrote: Mon Jan 04, 2021 10:42 am I've been thinking about taking one. It's interesting. They are not 100% because they depend on more people sending them back to show the true scope of the genetic spread. So if you have something exotic, it has more of a chance of being misidentified. Thats simply because it's been largely people in the west taking them, so some groups are under represented.

So what are you going to do, if you are part Alien?

Ifunkus wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 1:23 am I took the dna test, and found i am 1% viking 90% Scottish Irish and 9% English European, I also found out some dark family secrets as I matched up with 2 cousins that were had through an affair from my grandad, it was actually televised. But I think its a good thing brother. And as Marty said you are not alien, you are human, with a beautiful soul, that will carry on for eternity

Trobador222 wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 1:30 am

Ifunkus wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 1:23 am I took the dna test, and found i am 1% viking 90% Scottish Irish and 9% English European, I also found out some dark family secrets as I matched up with 2 cousins that were had through an affair from my grandad, it was actually televised. But I think its a good thing brother. And as Marty said you are not alien, you are human, with a beautiful soul, that will carry on for eternity

Your grandad's affair was televised?

Trobador222 wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 1:30 am

Ifunkus wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 1:23 am I took the dna test, and found i am 1% viking 90% Scottish Irish and 9% English European, I also found out some dark family secrets as I matched up with 2 cousins that were had through an affair from my grandad, it was actually televised. But I think its a good thing brother. And as Marty said you are not alien, you are human, with a beautiful soul, that will carry on for eternity

Your grandad's affair was televised?

Citizen Dolly wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 10:09 pm

Trobador222 wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 1:30 am

Ifunkus wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 1:23 am I took the dna test, and found i am 1% viking 90% Scottish Irish and 9% English European, I also found out some dark family secrets as I matched up with 2 cousins that were had through an affair from my grandad, it was actually televised. But I think its a good thing brother. And as Marty said you are not alien, you are human, with a beautiful soul, that will carry on for eternity

Your grandad's affair was televised?

On both channels. Rolling coverage. That's why the revolution didn't get televised.

Not sure I see the point in DNA tests personally, unless you're screening for genetic diseases. I suppose they could be good for African Americans wanting to find out about their roots given that circumstances have generally conspired to obscure them. I suspect that for most Europeans though there's little to learn that hasn't been transmitted through family histories. I mean, it's not much of a surprise for anybody in the UK to find they've got some Irish or Scandinavian or French ancestry given that they're all near neighbours we've had extensive interactions with over the centuries, and the significance of individual ancestors is often wildly overestimated anyway given just how many of them there are in total. Bear in mind that every generation you step back, the number of direct ancestors you have just in that generation doubles, and the numbers involved quickly get insane: just 10 generations back (about 250 years) there's 1024 people who are your direct ancestor, and the one carrying your family name is just one of them. Twenty generations back, and it's over a million. By the time you get back a thousand years, it's far more theoretical ancestors than have ever actually existed. (The secret to resolving this discrepancy, incidentally, is incest. Historically, marriages between cousins were commonplace, and that means that several of the theoretical ancestors are actually the same individuals. I'm not up to figuring out just how much inbreeding would be necessary though to bring the projected number of ancestors into line with actual historic population sizes.) Also, at least as far as I understand it, the DNA results are essentially a sort of palimpsest in that it can't really distinguish or place genetic events through time: having, say, 10% Scandinavian genes could mean that a substantial number of your ancestors were from there further back in history, or it could just mean your grandad was a Norwegian sailor.

Having said all that, I did do some family tree research a few years ago. Twas fun and interesting. The biggest surprise for me was probably just how deeply rooted I am in Sunderland. A good chunk of my ancestors have been here for upwards of 200 years, and at least one of the lines I was able to trace goes back just over 300 years here. As a bairn I was always more conscious of the Irish parts of the family, but it turned out they'd been here longer than I'd expected: the last of my Irish ancestors to have actually lived in Ireland were my greatx2 grandparents on my mam's side, and they'd been in the NE England since at least 1864. The Irish on my dad's side had been here since at least 1828 or so. Other than them and a couple of Germans 4 generations back, every ancestor I've been able to place has been from Northern England, and the vast majority of them from County Durham, and the bulk of them actually from Sunderland. Turns out I'm Mackem as fuck like.

Trobador222 wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 11:18 pm You run into some odd things in the US while trying to do family research. On my fathers side, some cousins tried to do that and found out a lot of the public records were lost during the Civil War. The courthouse where they were kept in the area my family lived was burned to the ground during the war.

We have some family stories going back to when our ancestors came to North America but nothing really about any family in the Old World. We know on my fathers side we were Scotch Irish. We know 7 brothers came over early in the 19th century. We know they had some money because they all bought large land holdings and became large farmers.

When I was a teenager, I had one Aunt who was kind of the keeper of a lot of that family history. Back in the 1970s, she took me around to some of the grave sites of those people who had come here. One of the graves was a large obelisk that had the names of my great great grandfather, his wife and two daughters and was the only surviving marker of an old cemetery that was in the middle of a corn field.

I am the baby of my generation. I will be 60 this month. My father was 50 when I was born. He was born in 1914. My grand parents on both sides were born in the 19th Century and when I was a boy, there were a lot of older relatives still living who were all born in the 1800s. So I grew up with that living history and that’s kind of neat. My father and my uncles on both sides were WW II vets and were in every theater of the war that the US was active in and all came home. So I grew up hearing first hand accounts of their experience.