Science Curious: Has Anybody Taken One of those DNA Tests?

like Ancestry.com or 23and me?

were you surprised by results? How accurate are they?

I was adopted as an infant so I know little about my tree, except I'm out of it

 

Never actually done it myself but my daughter in law and my aunt have...they came up with some interesting details but after they go back a couple of generations or so, how do we know for sure how accurate they are?....I mean they can make shit up and how would we know any differently?

...in other words, "we don't know what we don't know".

 

If you don't test you won't find anything. So you can just make shit up and it must be true.

 

No way, no how! You have NO CLUE who you're giving your DNA to. They couldn't possibly tell me anything worth knowing (for me, personally).

 

I know a lot of the major brands like Ancestry/23 and Me sell your data to the highest bidder. It’s used for pharmaceutical research, etc. 23 and Me actually is actually in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceuticals, which is...interesting. There are brands that aren’t simply data harvesting, however. If I decide to do one I might go that route.

 

No wonder you and El Pres are so simpatico.

 

I did it.

 

My wife was adopted and did both Ancestry.com and 23andme. both were quite interesting and gave different results and identified different relatives. Ancestry is better for finding relations but both worked. They use different markers so the information is not the same, and actually gets reclassified as more knowledge is garnered. For example you might be 5% Iberian peninsula but when the ancestry.com database grows sufficiently they may reclassify that 5% as a different people or from a different migration. The knowledge doesn’t stop and there is still a lot of work remaining. New matches continue to populate.

I will do it too some day but right now it’s less important for me since I have a pretty good record of my ancestral lineage. My wife trying to figure out who is her birth father. She has found many clues but unless you get a close match it’s still a puzzle. She now knows for certain several second and third cousins but that doesn’t quite solve the problem. We could hire a professional to try and solve the dilemma.

anyways, I recommend giving it a try. The cost is minimal compared to what can be learned.

 

Wasn't the Golden State killer identified with the help of these types of tests? That would be something good that has come out of it I guess.

 

I did it with Ancestry. Found out I was directly related to my mom, dad and siblings. HUGE relief.........

 

I spoke to a coworker's boyfriend at a casual gathering after work once, and the topic of DNA tests came up. At that time the dude said he'd really like to take a DNA test, so I gently told him that the tests are not very precise and the results depend on the DNA samples that the company already has. I kinda felt like I popped the dudes baloon. Anyway about three years later at an office party I asked the guy if he ever took the DNA test and he said he hadn't and was wondering why I asked him that, because he didn't remember our three year old conversation at all. So, here I am trying to convince my coworker's partner I didn't just come out of nowhere asking him about is DNA results. Anyway their children are adorable.

 

So I took the Ancestry.com DNA test.
It showed 0% German even though my paternal grandmother is 100% German.

The results indicate that I'm mostly a cracka azz viking.

 

I took quaaludes once.

 

Quitter!

 

I haven't. Vaguely curious since Palestine was crossroad between Asia, Africa and Europe so Jews could be anything. I remember when young seeing a photo of one of my mother's cousins in a flowered dress and asking who is that Japanese lady?

Around the time previous guy was inaugurated, his racist cult started getting DNA tests to prove their purity. Didn't last, as they kept learning they were anything but.

I remember when James Watson tried to claim people of African descent were genetically less intelligent, then his DNA test showed significant percentage of African ancestry.

 

Since my post of 2 years ago I have found that I too am far, far less German than I was told. I originally thought I was three quarter German. But I'm more than half UK, with a smidge of Dane. The rest is a mix of Dutch, German and Belgian. And......I found out I have a first cousin I was never aware of. Out of the blue this lady contacted me and said the Ancestry DNA showed us as cousins. And she looked like my mother's twin. Her mother had gotten pregnant in high school in the mid '50's, given birth to her and refused to ever talk about it. All my siblings and I could figure out was that it was my mother's ne'er do well brother because he would have been the correct age/time frame and location. And it would have perfectly fit my mother's family's dynamics. But anyone who might have any info is long past dead, so we're just going with what we have. My uncle was a shady character who gave "acknowledged" birth to one son, who is far shadier than his dad. I told my new found cousin all that, and she did some investigation on her own. While we hope to meet each other some day (she now lives in Canada), I think she's sorry to have turned that particular rock over and has no plans for going any farther. DNA can often give you stuff you might not want to know......

 

How funny would it be if the guy from Nashville took it and found out he was 50% liberal/50% minority