Genetic Communities and the Lies we Buy Ourselves

With much aggravation taken as penance I have finally been able to put to rest a cluster of four supposed Ancestor Discoveries (Beta). Turns out the four were Grandparents of second cousin 3x named Jessie May Kelly, a grandchild of the Day family. I am fairly disappointed that they were none relatives to me and indeed come from a branch I was just pondering over regarding the percentage of shared DNA.

I have had a week recently where I have been contacted only by paternal relations to me, and those I think are outside of my x-inheritance. It makes me wonder then about the randomness of dna assignment and how much if any I can really trust Ancestry.com services. I am up to five genetic companies which have my dna sample and have rendered ethnicity lists. There is some major variation between them all, but yet also a seeming obvious underlying cause. Clustering populations together creates a wide variety. My initial thought was that where France goes so do I, but there is also a question of whether France itself is one unit. Northern France is flavored with Britain as much as east and south are peppered with other border countries. Ancestry.com is the only of five companies to declare any Irish, while FTDNA tells me I have recent Amerindian...on 23andMe my West African is disappearing by the minute.

The New Genetic Communities feature looks quite fun and I have wanted an aggregated list of birthplaces for a map for quite sometime. While I made my own by hand once or twice they never are very accurate when new data is arriving each day or even week. A major problem that seems to show up is first degree relatives getting drastically different communities. My Father for example, has at least four or five with many placed overseas or in the American south, think Confederacy. I on the other hand have only a single group for French settlers along the St. Lawrence, excluding regions relevant to my father. It seems quite odd to be sharing no groups with a parent and I have heard this from other users as well.

So what is the basis for communities? It would seem to be a macro version of dna circles, of which parents and children should share. Yet I am only seeing confusion and complaints. Given the differences in my parents ethnic background there should be more. There just isn't...

Third Party Confirmations!

As much as I work as a lone wolf so to speak in my genealogy work I do enjoy having others input. Recently I took the plunge and enrolled in a small tribal band of Metis-Cree people. As a help for others I explained the methods I had used so far in differentiating my own genetic markers for native blood. To my great surprise another member messaged me who was quite confident with using gedmatch himself. He is lucky enough to be a direct male descendant from Henri Membertou's band of Mi'kmaq. I was provided from him a three way match between him, myself and a even less diluted relation. The result was a positive match to the Mi'kmaq peoples. I would say to Henri himself but more likely it would be through one of his many contributing female relations.

Chr Start Location End Location Centimorgans (cM) SNPs
10 92446647 95958204 3.7 903
11 56368374 59769693 1.2 717
13 83990938 88896945 3.1 816
21 21293037 24043081 4.0 716
Largest segment = 4.0 cM
Total of segments > 1 cM = 12.0 cM
Estimated number of generations to MRCA = 7.1

Comparison took 0.05190 seconds.
Distant relation.


So this is a interesting factor in what I already know since I compose over four regions of native populations in the small sector I carry. Another cooperation comes from having limited access to my fathers genetic data. Being able to look at his smaller portion of native dna cleared up any possibility of my larger portion coming from him. Indeed my two largest portions of north amerindian and arctic do not come from him. My fathers tracers are for small portions of the south amerindian and mesoamerican. This I had already presumed but rather it is nice to have confirmed in mathematical calculation.

Another change from this last few weeks of research is discovering some depth to two of my fathers grandmothers lines. Along with that is some details on what was coined "Southern European" in earlier results. I now have confirmation through oracle population matching that my southern component is predominately Spanish with only a smattering of Italian. This follows at least the presence of late Italian ancestry in one portion of my tree but I have yet to connect the Spanish in genealogical records.

DNA Updates and Forthcomings

Well GEDmatch has finally finished with the re-tokenizing of my DNA pack. It seems that some of the simulations had errors which were pinging mostly in unrelated ethnic results but nonetheless gedmatch decided to rerun new editions for errors. This changes my results to a small degree. The smallest changes are to do with my largest portions. My European percentages are now farther east with 47% a solid mix of Fennoscandia and the Slavic countries bordering Russia. At this time my Celtic/British strains are only 6%. I am still left unsure which country provides the dominant amount of my 34% Mediterranean. Northern Italian and Iberian are both cited. The near east populations matches continue to tantalize me if only because I cannot find their source genealogically.  Roughly 10% of my blood is still Persian which I find amazing.

The more drastic changes have come in the form of my smallest amounts. While initially HarappaWorld and MDLP both cited my mesoamerican DNA from the Muscogee it is now something else. In a sense it could be a more accurate result. About 5% of my result is from South Amerindian and Arctic Amerindian. The latter would correspond to my mother's Mi'kmaq heritage. From what I've gathered online the south is most likely representative of Cherokee. I rather guess that does make more sense since there were only small amounts of exogamy in my direct relations. As the Cherokee are fairly wide, the bands can simply interchange children without looking in another region. Eurogenes still says Mayan...Ugh! But it also indicates a southeast Asia portion as well as oceanic which are barely above threshold.

What I do still find strange is my Samoyed and Berinigan DNA. They are very small amounts but I'm not sure which region to classify them under in my processing of this. I gather for the most part I work on a three category system; European, Asiatic & American. If it doesn't fit those groups than it's wasteful knowledge.

I also took a look at the new ancestry ethnicity predictor. I do find it helpful that they separated my Irish and British blood apart. That makes me confused however about whether Scottish is really the same as British. According to their diagrams it is separate and I have none. My new ancestry numbers are: 52% Great Britain, 21% Scandinavian, 15% Irish, 8% Iberian, 2% Grecco-Italian, 1% Eastern European and <1% Western European. At least that is more interesting than my original pie of British, Scandinavian and unknown. Still I find it very odd that Ancestry states my British as high as 50% when all other groups dictate that it is <26%. Consider for one that as of currently all the calculators for gedmatch place me at 6%. I think it makes ancestry look stupid. I still hope however to upload to FTDNA for my maternal test and correspond my admixture there. My tight budget might make it a Christmas gift to myself.

Unzipping My Raw DNA, Part Two

I don't believe that most people are prepared to make the jump in amateur genealogy to that of the intermediate especially with the inclusion of genetics. When the veil is lifted and you see who you are deep in your cells and atoms it can be either encouraging or feel as though all your work has been through colored glasses. Genetic testing is probably a positive for those whose ancestors were static and the acculturated generations match those that actually make up your being. I'm having the rather mirror-house experience where the recent does not match not only who I am as a person, but also is a falsification or at best over-simplification of the real genetic source.

The time it's taken to run the simulators and compile them into a single excel document however has given me enough pause to collect most of my thoughts. I have to remember that the exotic is mostly deep ancestry so it would not be relevant necessarily except for some quirks. Yet the mirror house experience is that, everything is exotic, at least in comparison to the records and beliefs of those still living today. Working first with admixtures there is a varying degree of interpretation still to the amount of 'white' that I am. Ancestry's estimate was 52% British isles/34% Scandinavian, on the whole roughly 80-90% carbon white.

Harrapaworld, Asia map, disputes this number with only a maximum of 48.5% European. 'Africa 9' on Dodecad echo's a similar opinion that I am 67.5% or less European (including Indo-European as strictly white). Dodecad World version 3 places this number closer to 52% with the rest highly africanized Iberian or west/southwest asian. Eurogenes perhaps gave the most honest admixture result due to it's definitive sub sects. North Sea, which includes water bound parts of Scandinavia as well as the British isles rests at only 20%. JTest states that of these European groups only 25.4% is wholly white and inadmissible as Jewish. I am only 3% however above the noise level (2.5%) for Azkenazi Jewish heritage so the direct line there is remote. Yet the large chucks of central and eastern European do echo the ancestry given my fathers genetic test.

Southern heritage is much more pronounced than Ancestry claimed with some rare alleles coming from Cyprus, Lithuania, and East Asia. Spain and Northern Italy are the founders of my southern heritage with only one so far found in the genealogical record. Dodecad World 9, for example places me at 72.5% Atlantic_Baltic, 25.5% Caucusus/Southern European and around 1.5% Amerindian. 1.5 is interpreted over and over as either Asiatic or Amerindian, notably however it is inferred as Mexican/Central American Indian when addressed. It also increases as high as 3-8% given the presence of oceanic, papuan, beringian and east asian derivatives. If this was a test I don't believe that 20-53% is ever a passing grade so why would I ignore the beautiful multicultural heritage I have.

So what about the estimations given by Ancestry.com? Well I think I figured that out partially inspired by a comment by the authors of GEDMatch's algorithms. "It not just the presence of a unique factor but also the presence of that percentage compared to like individuals." Thus unique factors on chromosomes could be viewed as noise and with strict interpretation ignored completely as genetic drift for known populaces. With the wars over centuries of the Germanic tribes then it would be easy to assume a known factor level of 'noise' and thus exclude it altogether. I believe this is how Ancestry.com applies their ethnicity predictor so it is most simplified and accurate for Europeans, no doubt their largest consumer at whole.

So what am I? Very roughly estimated in admixture...

• 26-40% Southern European (Spanish, Italian, Iberian, Sardinian) 
• 18-24% British Isles/North Seas (Great Britain, France, Scandinavia) 
• 12-26% Middle Eastern (Persian, Near East, West Asia)
• 8-10% Eastern European (West Germany, Balkan, Slav)
• 3-8% Asian/Amerindian (Mezoamerican, Beringian; East-South Asia, Oceania)
• 3-5% North African (Mozabite, Morroccan, Byaka)

Unzipping My Raw DNA, Part One

It's no secret that I was wholly unimpressed with the ethnicity finder on Ancestry.com and it's lack of features. So now that the voices of the many have been heard and my raw data is available I've tried to resist the urge to spread it around like jam on the internet. My first stop was GEDMatch who unfortunately are having server issues because of so many new Ancestry submissions. Moving on then I headed over to Interprenome that is headed by Stanford university science department staff/students.

This new emulator took me from too little data to quite substantially too much!

One of the questions that came about for me was the only unique factor on my AncestryDNA page was a small portion of unspecific southern european. I have been racking my brain and looking for any cooralation in my records that could account for that. The only match I made was to the obscure Italian women who married into the FitzAlan royalty quite far back in my tree's centuries. I am of the opinion that I also need a more specific study journal of my findings since I recall while working inside the Aleramici family in my tree I also came across some women of Spain. The non-specificity even lead too some uncomfortable considerations of probable NPE's and adoption excuses. Interprenome has provided me a unexpected answer in the pan-euro scale. I am quite well into Spanish distribution.

The issue remained of my Cryptozoic-Jewish history supposedly among the women of my father's father ancestry. So using the Asia logarithm I found myself well placed among the Pathan, Sindhi, and Hazara. My closest east/central asian is the Miao Zu people of southern china. To be honest I had no expectations of the Asia group so to find myself clearly defined as a Persian descendant I abesolutley had to know whether I placed on the Pan-Judica map.

Yet another surprise lay for me. I do not place close enough for an exact kinship among the Jewish sample studies. My personal opinion on this is then that I don't have actual Jewish ancestry except to such a minor degree. My Persian history however is echo'ed twice over by my closest match being Iranian and Turkish.

The accuracy of this information of course isn't proven until I run the raw data through GEDMatch. I am hoping to learn my MTDNA haplogroup which according to Interprenome is probably (N1 derivative), but that is just a random guess with very little knowledge behind it.

I look forward to my GEDMatch being finished...hopefully sooner than 4-6 weeks... in order to review these findings and demolish any errors or misgivings I have.

Merry Christmas from Brittania

The time has come that my long awaited DNA testing results are in. As mentioned before my Father didn't like his results but I've been reading more about that. As the Genetic Genealogist puts it "Everybody has two tree's!" So I expected the unexpected but also held fast to the fact that I probablly inherited the more obvious traits from my French line in my mother's tree and now a suspected grouping in my Father's. Much to my surprise I came up with results more like what my Father had expected for himself.

To the left is the snippet from my results placing me well into the Welsh/Irish and English inheritance both my parents carry. It was also looking at this that I realized some of the birth locations for my relatives in France must be formatted wrong because they aren't even on the map here. I assumed that I inherited the Scandinavian from my Dad but in relative finder we don't match there which is odd since he has a high percentage as well.


So this has led me into a bit of a History lesson. Having just watched the "Monarchy: UK" show on Netflix I was rather refreshed on some of the Norman conquest details from my supposed 'Stewart' connection. I used this to explain to my Father why his Central European was probably so high since Norman soldiers settled mostly in that area taking indigenous wives as did there sons for generations.

The southern European is my big surprise which also led to some historical research. I came across two theories besides of course a recent 'npe' (Non Paternity Event). The first is that recent studies have shown that Scottish stock was descended from a paleohispanic peoples called Iberians. Their fisherman it said crossed the bay of Biscay about 6,000 years ago into the Isles.

As an after thought it is also possible that a portion of my southern French families could have actually been Italians living abroad. The Boissil's (Boussey) and Grossejambe's both dead end about 1600.

Now more intresting is a more recent migration via conquest before the Normans. When Rome was at it's end as an empire around 300 AD it had just worked it's way into the British Isles. As the war period broke down the Military men settled in Britain, however it was for 200 years (since the winning of Britain), illegal for Roman men to marry local women. This meant that they shipped in women from other countries in the roman empire like Spain, Italy and France. So by the time the law was lifted there was a strong genetic group of Romans within the confines of Britain. This is why a distinct level of Roman survives today in people of British descent despite their lack of knowledge to it. I look forward to more detail being added to the algorithms in the future especially to uncover my 6% unknown which is twice the amount of my fathers. For now I will plug away trying to find this Italian or Hispanic connection I have.

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Read More about Iberians: Independent News/ Wikipedia
Rome in Britain: Surprising DNA

Habits and Coincidences

There is something funny about following family legends through quantitative data and that funny thing is seeing the unreported legacies we leave behind. My ancestry-DNA sample was finally received at the laboratory within the last week. I pray it hasn't decayed to much since it took about a month to be shipped thanks to the holiday seasons.  Hearing that I have 6-8 weeks before a major surprise I couldn't help but ponder once again over my Father's results of dominantly central European despite the family stories that he was distinctly Nordic-Celt. There are of course some holes within the maternal lines for him which I believe might fill many percentage gaps. Adding to the mystery is my hematologist's discovery that I have yet another inherited condition that is distinctly of Mediterranean descent lines. I just find it so darn humorous since genetics obviously does not lie. Thalassemia, my newest suspected diagnosis, does confirms my Fathers genetic testing results however.

My DNA results will most likely not match my Fathers at all, at least in percentage. Now I do know that within my maternal grandfather's line there is a influence from southern France. Most men of the Welsh and English descent chose French wives. In reverse of this having just worked on some of my more recent German ancestors I see that they favored English wives. In fact while they remain so proud of being German they carry almost no cultural influence from it in recent generations and no one speaks the language naturally. I might say this has something to do with the influx of English wives since they ran the household. There is also the matter of joining a culturally deficient religion in the recent years.

The French left their Catholicism and the Germans left Mennonite beliefs to join the Joseph Smith fad. My families on both sides are proud of being so involved generationaly with RLDS (Community of Christ), though its not as many as they assume. I however feel that its stolen away a lot of the traditions that are unique to earlier generations who practiced more classical religions. For the most part my family doesn't see their descent lines anymore. We divide ourselves as American or Canadian at this point. It's a shame to let go of so much yet with each generation we gain a lot. I gather at this point I've torn the threads of my history apart so far that's it hard to enjoy the fabric now as a unit. I have a feeling that my results from DNA sampling might inspire me to look elsewhere. As an example my Father thinks that our history might be boggled by assumptions past three generations above him. This brings up the possibility of a different heritage line stemming back to Italy and France...I can't help but see that it is reminiscent of his DNA results. What a coincidence..?!

Finding Cousins

My sister Heather has been commenting that I spend too much of my research time on dead sources when we have plenty of living cousins to find. She is right of course that I have almost no focus on living relatives. This is mostly due to how proliferative my 'Wismer' family has been up in Canada. Cousins upon cousins.

After the Leitzke, Neitzke debacle last week I am slightly more interested in living relatives than I have been in the past. As a change I ended up diving into the Boussey (Boissy) line of my Maternal Grandfather's tree. This would be the famous 'Fillies du Roi' decendency for which I have considered putting in a application to the society. A lot of my data has come from a user named 'AlyceBoussy' on Ancestry and I was curious enough to track her line from our common ancestor down.

It was fairly exciting to see that for the most part she was in a similar family design as I was with one or two families marrying siblings doubling our genetic comparisons. Closer however to recent I find that while her Father was predominantly french he married a lovely Italian woman. Following my own tree you have a predominately French woman marrying a Welshman. The difference that these  derivatives might make was tantalizing. I began to wonder whether she would have a interest in conversing with me.

So as I found Alyce's information I found that she had unfortunately passed away about 4 years ago and the family had not taken down her work. Four years is when I began doing research and so I missed a chance to reach out to a cousin I didn't know I had and find a connection that I am missing to French culture. This is especially disheartening since it is my Grandfather's family that I have little to no knowledge of.  His mother had been a Boussey and so I am grateful to Alyce's family for not taking down her work. Yet here I sit still missing my contacts as well from the Jones family line for most of my Grandfather's brothers: Murray, Floyd, Henry, & Ralph all predeceased him. After my grandfather's death the families separated and the 'Jones & Sons, LTD' was dissolved.

As of now I have placed in over 1700 unique people into my tree and most of those in the past week are cousins that I am no longer willing to miss out on. Perhaps I will find the secret to the Jones' in the old reunion papers that my Grandmother Lucienna has sent to me through my mother.