DNA tests don’t always help with family roots

[Predator]

DNA tests don’t always help with family roots

By Andy Sullivan



DNA testing can free an innocent person from death row, warn a healthy person about impending heart disease, and show this red-headed reporter that his ancestors came from ... Europe.

A new range of genetic tests promise to help consumers explore their ancestral origins for as little as $129, injecting a jolt of crime-show pizazz into a hobby more often associated with musty courthouse records.

These tests promise to reveal long-lost relatives, uncover roots obscured by slavery, or simply allow those curious about where they came from to skip all that tedious digging.

But as I found out, the results can be underwhelming.

Three weeks after I mailed off a few spit-soaked cotton swabs to the genealogy service Ancestry.com, officials from the company called to discuss my results. “You’re sort of the European everyman,” said Ancestry.com chief historian Megan Smolenyak, explaining that I come from the most common genetic groups in Europe on both my mother’s and father’s sides.

Ancestry.com did turn up some surprises, but not from the DNA test. From the site’s massive database of public records, I discovered my ancestors included Massachusetts Pilgrims, some of the first Europeans to settle in North America. Human genes mutate gradually, so the test couldn’t tell me much about where in Europe my ancestors came from. The best it could show was that my Y chromosome, which I inherited from my father and his father, is common in the British Isles and Spain.

The closest match Ancestry.com found was the company’s CEO, another guy named Sullivan, who shared a common ancestor with me 15 generations ago. Closer matches are likely to crop up as more people take the tests, Smolenyak said. The test did show the path my ancestors took out of east Africa tens of thousands of years ago — scientific proof of the common roots I share with everyone on the planet.

For my mother-in-law, who ordered a similar test through National Geographic, that was satisfaction enough. “It makes the human migration very personal,” said Sara Goetz, who found that she shared a genetic profile with most European Jews, even though her ancestors come from Sweden.

Genetic testing can help scientists determine, for example, exactly when humans first crossed from Siberia to the Americas. And many black Americans who take the test discover they are descended partly from white slave owners — a legacy of the United States’ ugly past.

For me, recent centuries held more surprises than the deep ancestry uncovered by the DNA test. As I keyed in my ancestors into the site’s software — the Irish doctors and coal miners, the German shoe salesman, the Italian saloonkeeper and his Swiss mail-order bride who set up shop in the Nevada outback — the site offered up their census records, marriage certificates and ship manifests.

It also checked their names against those already entered by the site’s 15 million users. —Reuters

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A range of genealogy companies now offer DNA testing to those curious about their ancestry.
Here are a few facts about DNA genealogy tests:

— Tests cost between $119.00 and $895.00 and are available from a variety of online vendors.

- Different tests are used to trace maternal and paternal ancestry.

— Paternal DNA is found on the Y chromosome, which is passed down unchanged from father to son. Because women do not have a Y chromosome, those wishing to test their paternal line must have a brother or father take the test for them.

— Maternal DNA is found in mitochondria, the organelles that provide energy to cells. Women and men can take this test.

— DNA tests can’t give a complete picture of your ancestry because they are only capable of tracing direct matrilenial and patrilineal lines, in other words, your mother’s mother’s mother, or your father’s father’s father. The test does not reveal the genetic makeup of other forebears, such as your maternal grandfather.

— The tests show your broad genetic category, or ‘haplogroup’, and where in the world that group is commonly found. But the tests cannot identify more specific ancestral information such as which town or river valley your ancestors came from.

— Tests can indicate that two people are related if their results match up closely.

Scientists have called on test providers to better educate consumers about their limitations and have warned that the tests should not be used to resolve legal disputes, such as whether somebody qualifies for membership in an American Indian tribe.—Reuters


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