Small Talk: MaxDot Decompression Sucks

[Meredith Quill]

The Small Talk topic is for:

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[SoMuchTV]

Haha. I was considering requesting a full forum, with "On the bus" as the small talk title, but I couldn't think of titles for anything else.

Thanks, tptb.

[jewel21]

Has anyone ever done one of those Ancestry DNA kits? Were you surprised by the results?

[Raja]

18 hours ago, jewel21 said:

Has anyone ever done one of those Ancestry DNA kits? Were you surprised by the results?

Especially black people who would be mixed from all over Africa. When Oprah did her's and it came up as Zulu I called fraud as expected that all would come up as Zulu or Mandingo from Roots back then.

Ours came up it a small percentage of Filipino among other things and I go with the Jeanette Goldstein, Marine Private Vazquez from Aliens joke, that she was only Mexican by insemination and that is the only explanation for Filipino showing up among the various Western African and European strands.

Edited November 2, 2019 by Raja

[doodlebug]

On ‎11‎/‎1‎/‎2019 at 3:50 PM, jewel21 said:

Has anyone ever done one of those Ancestry DNA kits? Were you surprised by the results?

My sister did and it turned out as expected.  However, we are only third generation in the US on my Dad's side and so we knew where our great grandparents lived in Eastern/Central Europe.  We also knew we came from peasant stock, so it was unlikely that anyone from outside of that area would've been in the family tree since poor people don't travel.  Although my mother's family had been in the US longer, since pre-Revolutionary days, she had a pretty well defined family tree and knew that the original settlers in the US from her side were English, Irish and German and that is exactly what the profile showed.  

I think the accuracy of the results relies, at least in part, in how many people from the same area have already been profiled and are in the data bank.  As I recall, at least part of the reason that Oprah's initial results were not very accurate was because the Ancestry DNA registry from Africa was incomplete and there were many tribes/peoples who were not represented.  I believe they have since travelled to Africa and gotten samples from remote and isolated groups and from what I've heard, the profiles for those of African descent are more accurate these days.

Same sister also did DNA testing on one of her dogs, a rescue from the pound using one of the sites that does it.  It was laughably bad.  Her dog didn't resemble any of the several breeds that were supposedly in his background.  

Edited November 6, 2019 by doodlebug

[jewel21]

My brother had his done and then I did mine shortly after. I ended up with small percentages of ethnicites that didn't make sense to me. They updated it recently and most of those have disappeared now. 

However, I have 15/% Greek showing up and 6% French and that is really throwing me off. My mom is Polish and my dad is Italian (both parents and grandparents). I grew up telling everyone I'm half Polish and half Italian. 

Now, suddenly, I'm only 12% Italian according to Ancestry. I'm more Greek than Italian and that makes no sense to me or my family.  My Italian grandfather's side of the family tree is pretty mapped up. I have info on his family going back to the mid-late 1700s and they all were born and died more or less in the same small town. Heck, three of my grandfather's brothers still live in that town. 

My grandmother's side I don't have much info on, so it's possible she is where the mix is coming into play, but never once growing up did anyone ever say we were Greek or had Greek in the family. It's really strange. 

[Browncoat]

I have a relative who has done all the legwork with more conventional genealogy, and I did the Ancestry thing just to see how accurate it was.  I know through marriage and birth records that I have Scottish, Irish, German, and Native American roots.  The Scottish, Irish, and German showed up just fine with Ancestry, but not so much with the Native Americans.  At the time, Ancestry just didn't have any Native Americans in their database.  Not sure if they've done more for that, but my DNA was all over the place.

Has anyone compared Ancestry with 23AndMe?

[jewel21]

My cousin wanted us to do the 23andMe but I was already so confused with my Ancestry DNA results that I worried about what would happen if the results varied too much. My head might explode, lol. Seriously, how am I more Greek than Italian?

[shapeshifter]

On 11/2/2019 at 10:54 AM, jewel21 said:

My brother had his done and then I did mine shortly after. I ended up with small percentages of ethnicites that didn't make sense to me. They updated it recently and most of those have disappeared now. 

However, I have 15/% Greek showing up and 6% French and that is really throwing me off. My mom is Polish and my dad is Italian (both parents and grandparents). I grew up telling everyone I'm half Polish and half Italian. 

Now, suddenly, I'm only 12% Italian according to Ancestry. I'm more Greek than Italian and that makes no sense to me or my family.  My Italian grandfather's side of the family tree is pretty mapped up. I have info on his family going back to the mid-late 1700s and they all were born and died more or less in the same small town. Heck, three of my grandfather's brothers still live in that town. 

My grandmother's side I don't have much info on, so it's possible she is where the mix is coming into play, but never once growing up did anyone ever say we were Greek or had Greek in the family. It's really strange. 

Greece and Italy are geographically close enough that prior to the 1700s, one or more ancestors may have come to Italy from Greece. 
My ex’s father’s extended family all came from a town in Austria to a town in Germany, and then several generations later they all migrated to a town in Ohio. 
I imagine this sort of extended family movement in which they don’t all move simultaneously requires some literacy and access to postal service. 

[jewel21]

2 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

Greece and Italy are geographically close enough that prior to the 1700s, one or more ancestors may have come to Italy from Greece. 
My ex’s father’s extended family all came from a town in Austria to a town in Germany, and then several generations later they all migrated to a town in Ohio. 
I imagine this sort of extended family movement in which they don’t all move simultaneously requires some literacy and access to postal service. 

Thanks, that makes sense. My grandfather recently said there was talk we might have come from Spain but he was doubtful about it. It looks like it was probably Greece. I will have to bring it up with him and see what he says.  

[Yeah No]

On 11/5/2019 at 6:17 PM, jewel21 said:

My cousin wanted us to do the 23andMe but I was already so confused with my Ancestry DNA results that I worried about what would happen if the results varied too much. My head might explode, lol. Seriously, how am I more Greek than Italian?

Did you ever see the commercial for Ancestry.com where the guy says his family thought they were German but then his DNA said he was Irish so he traded his lederhosen for a kilt?  LOL

I'm half Italian (Sicilian) and lots of Sicilians have Greek DNA in them because Eastern Sicily (Syracusa) was colonized by the ancient Greeks.  Archimedes was a Greek living in Sicily.  My earlier DNA results from several years back used to show some Greek DNA but more recently that's disappeared as the aggregate comparison samples have improved.  But interestingly, the greater area where they show Italians' DNA coming from includes Greece and vice versa.  Earlier, less specific results used to lump Italian and Greek DNA together and didn't differentiate between the two.  So my guess as a non-expert is that there is some overlap between the two countries and in some cases it can be harder to pinpoint which country a certain strain means you come from.  Perhaps they don't have so many Italians in their samples with your specific haplogroup, but they do have more Greeks so it's coming through as more Greek than Italian.  Perhaps in time as the samples improve you will see your results change to include more Italian.  The thing we have to remember is that country borders are a human construct and mean nothing when it comes to DNA.  There is a lot of overlap in Europe in DNA samples especially in countries so near each other, so narrowing it down to one country is not always that easy.

I've done both Ancestry and 23 and Me DNA tests and they do vary.  According to Ancestry.com, I'm 53% Italian, but according to 23 and Me I'm only 39.8% Italian, with a higher proportion of less specific "broadly southern European", which probably accounts for the difference.  The results are only as specific and accurate as the samples your DNA is being compared to are specific, representative and accurate.  So it's not as hard a science as we would like it to be, but it is improving so stay tuned!

Edited November 7, 2019 by Yeah No

[CrazyMoon]

Mine vary as well...my mom was half German (her mother) and half Norwegian (her father)...my dad was pure Celt (Welsh, Irish/Scot)...turns out that isn't quite accurate. Mine shows significant Scandinavian, some Eastern European (apparently my GGrandmother's family lived in an area of West Prussia that overlapped Poland, which disappeared regularly into Germany or Russia) along with a great amount of British than included all of Wales, Ireland & Scotland as well as England. Our individual DNA picks up traits from the gene soup we come from. My sister's is at least 50% equal to mine,, but we carry many different traits as well. She resembles our Scandinavian roots (tall, blond, sturdy peasant legs), I our Welsh roots...copper blond, green eyes, shorter...National Geographic traced migration patterns through the maternal line, which for me is the southern Sudanese region up through Egypt, across to Italy/Greece and on to Denmark, but that's more 10k years ago