Taking the Ancestry.com DNA Kit

I was excited when I got my Ancestry.com DNA test results. Due to my genealogy research there were no big shocks for me but it did verify and validate some of the intuitive leaps I took in assuming who my family members were. 

That’s exciting news, Ancestor Hunters!

The kit itself is straightforward. No drinking or eating for a half hour. Spit in a tube to the line. Package it in the packing they provide. Put it in the mail. Wait for an e-mail. They say 4-6 weeks for results. Mine came in 4 weeks.

These results are the 50% of DNA I received from my mother. I am curious now for my sister to take it because she may have received different maternal genes than me and her percentage make-up may vary. Because women are XX we can only map the X code. We have no Y to trace. If I want to know the paternal DNA, which I do, I have to poke the nearest and closest male relative on that side of the family. That’s my dad. The ideal option would be a brother but dad is second best. The further away you go the more variations that occur between what they got and what I got, so the percentages quickly become guesstimates. But it’s closer than not knowing anything.

Culturally, all of my ancestors are all of my ancestors. I only exist because they each existed. So to layer that with the concept that there is actual genetic code from some of them in my body now... I think that’s cool.

I should also note that men have a choice to do maternal or paternal or both as they have both the X and Y. I'm a bit jealous of that.

When you do the kit you have to activate it on-line first which involves creating an account on Ancestry.com. I hesitated to do it as I already had an account with my dad but it goes to his e-mail and he doesn’t check it often and I didn’t want to have to wait on him getting them to me- haha! Totally true. So I started a new account so I could get the results as soon as they were ready. And it afforded me the chance to try it out from a fresh perspective.

It’s free to do. And it ended up being better than I expected. When my results came in, they included a list of other people who have been tested and who allowed for their tests to be shared for this purpose. So my results came with a list of second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth cousins... Their messenger feature allowed me to send messages to some of my new-found cousins to see how we related to one another!

Then I was offered the ThruLines option. If I plugged in a family tree I’d be able to see what ancestors all those new cousins and I shared in common. Cool! I figured that this was going to be where they were going to asking me to join a membership. Nope. Making the family tree comes with the free account. It's researching their archives that costs money. 

[It might be worth it to do the family tree and then subscribe to the site for a month and do research on the names you have.]

Even without the ability to search the archives, the tree maker is fantastic and better than any other free ones on the web. Ancestry.com is constantly upgrading their applications and a new feature on the family tree offers you potential fathers and mothers for the names you plug in. You can accept or deny them, or even say 'maybe' so you don’t necessarily need to pay to search. Ancestry.com helps you do that.

That meant I did not have to manually plug in the 2200 names I had already! It offered me about 1600 of the names I already had. I double-checked what they offered against my notes from the family tree my father and I have been working on together and what Ancestry.com suggested to me was 98% accurate.

That was a feature I did not expect.

Along with the percentage results you get a map with the countries your people are from highlighted. 

A cool feature with the maps is that if you click on the seemingly random century timeline on the bottom it will show you where your people were at the start of each century. You can see vague migration patterns. And if you’re very English, like me, and your people don’t move around so much, you can zoom in on the map and see it in more detail!

I am very happy with this test. It’s the only one I’ve taken so I can’t speak to any others. I would like to take the 23&me test to see what genetic anomalies lurk in my ancestral blood and see how the results compare.

As far as genetic privacy goes, you have options when you activate the kit. You can change those options anytime you want through your account settings. They were explained well. I should say that the more private your settings the less matches you will find yourself with. I risked it. I don’t like making choices-for-now based on what might happen in the future. But it's a personal choice. You can have your account and dna deleted at any time. 

I’ll be posting about some of the things I learned in the upcoming weeks. Happy hunting to my fellow genealogists!

A consumer reports article that walks you through how to delete dna results from 23&me, Ancestry, and My Heritage.

Genetic Memory

Being able to find facts of my ancestors’ lives through my genealogical research has been very rewarding. But it’s not the meat of what I want to know. I want to know who they were, what behaviors dictated their choices. Were they kind? Honest? Were they survivors? Were they selfish? There’s no true way of knowing, except in the bits of written documents I am sometimes lucky to find where their character is described.

What I really want to know is how much like me they struggled through the world; is there more of them in me than this blood? Did they make some of the same mistakes I have made? Or have I made some of their same mistakes?

The idea that we can carry hurts and wounds and anxieties through our bloodstream, passing them onto our children, is an energetic truth I accepted, unsure of what the science would say. I have felt the weight of my ancestors’ choices, both good and ill. And then I came across an article in the May 2013 issue of Discover Magazine that put science to my theory.

You can read the article for yourself here.

The article talks about the new branch of science derived from epigenetics, where methyl groups attach themselves to our DNA, acting like bookmarks, seeking out specific DNA genes needed for the cell’s proteins. The DNA itself does not mutate, but the methyl groups, isolating those specific genes, decide the recipe that makes you who you are. I am not a geneticist and that is the bare bones of what I understand.

Geneticists discovered that epigenetic changes in DNA can occur in adult years. It was previously believed this happened only in early development. These epigenetic changes can also be passed from parent to child. They discovered that both diet and chemicals can account for these changes, but what of life experiences? This query is what launched behavioral epigenetics, a science which states that psychological and behavioral tendencies are inherited.

These scientists wondered about the descendants of those who had survived brutal cultural massacres; like the Jews in Russia and Germany, the Tutus in Rwanda, the Native Americans who walked the Trail of Tears, and all those innocent children born and yet to be born to the rape victims in the Republic of the Congo. Do they inherit a tendency towards depression or anger in these methyl groupings? Through a series of tests, they discovered that yes, they do. And, just as we might inherit the bad things from our parents, we might also inherit the good. Perhaps those fairy tale ideas of family lines being “trustworthy” or “courageous” were not just romantic ideals.

What they also discovered, separately, is that we can alter these negative traits in our DNA through positive life experiences. This is where nurture comes into play. We can break the family curse, so to speak. So for me, the question of nature versus nurture is as unanswerable as asking what came first. Both the chicken and the egg are necessary for both to exist.

Drug companies are taking this science and attempting to create a medication that would cleanse us of these negative methyl groups, in the hopes of gifting people a clean slate. But those of us who do this Work know there is another way. Psychiatrists already do re-patterning work, which is like nurturing your brain into believing something different than what you’ve experienced. It’s not a lie. It’s gifting another way of responding to an experience you have already had. I would believe that this work also detaches some of those unwanted methyls from your DNA. This science is still being explored, but it lends credence to some of my Ancestor work- healing family tragedies that may have caused ripples down the family line, known or unknown.

Our emotional bodies exist just as fully and surely as our physical bodies do. Just like a broken bone that doesn’t mend correctly can affect your future gait, emotional scarring from abuse and violence can alter what your persona might otherwise have been. What this new science theorizes, is that if you have children after these events occur, you could pass that behavioral change onto the next generation.

It’s why personal growth is so important. It’s why doing your work is the most important thing you could do for your children. In my own family, we tend towards anxiety. What if that is an inherited trait caused by some event in my family’s past? I don’t think you have to know what happened. What if we could heal that in this generation of children so that it was not passed on when they procreated? What if we were the last cycle of that anxiety?

The idea of making amends, of healing the river of emotional dis-ease cascading down into me is like a way of cleaning up my emotional environment. I am healing all of the baggage of those methyl hitch hikers. I am doing it for me. If I were going to have children, I would also be doing it for them. I do this work so that I might help others do this work, so that we can all make choices from our own place of authenticity, and let the ghosts who walked before us rest.

Our Ancient Ancestors

We’re nearing harvest time in the Northeast. I have already plucked handfuls of green and purple beans from our small garden and am readying for the plump green tomatoes that will ripen red and yellow soon. The land is rich and verdant with life at this time of year and the whispering voices of my ancestors find me more easily as centuries of lives overlay across each other in a shared body memory of readying for harvest.

Knowing so much of my genealogy has been a blessing for which I am grateful. I understand now that even if I was not gifted the ability to trace my line back through documented lives, I would feel the tug and pull in my blood back to a time when man lived off the land, before houses, before settling in a fixed spot. I would feel it as surely as a body cannot help but feel the pull of the tide as the water carries it out to sea.

There are many times in my adult days that I have felt an internal emotion of being lost or feeling adrift. A buoy lost in the ocean. It’s the gravity that opened my mind up to wanting to know my place in the world and motivated me to find my place in the world by quieting myself and discovering what was happening in the world around me, right now.

            It has often made me wonder what it would feel like to not be able to trace any of my ancestry. What if I was adopted? What if there simply weren’t any names or clues? In some of my research into the lesser-known side of my family tree I discovered that another descendant of one of my ancestors, one more directly descended, participated in a DNA research program produced by National Geographic that traced Captain Samuel Walker’s genetic ancestry.

            According to the Genographic Project, descendants of Samuel Walker belong to a specific genetic Haplogroup based on a Y-chromosome test. The Haplogroup is I2b1 (M223+). According to other information they have acquired, this specific Haplogroup originated in northern France 14,000 to 18,000 years ago and is found most commonly within Viking and/or Scandanavian populations in northwest Europe.

            This Haplogroup could be further separated into three subclades. For example, I21b1a (M284+) originated specifically in the Bristish Isles, between 3,120 and 3,700 years ago. Unfortunately, Samuel Walker tested negatively against the three known subclades so any further tailoring won’t occur without more samples, though the known information posits that the line is of Viking origin.

            What does that mean? Per the test results, if this were my direct line, I would know that the M223+ strain was a genetic mutation that occurred in a single man living in what we now know as southern France. As the glaciers retreated north, so did the animal herds and so did the hunters with this strain. Their descendants founded the Gravettian culture known for their voluptuous Venus figurines. Which would give me a visual group of humans to reach backwards into history to connect to.

The National Geographic Genographic Project

The National Geographic Society began the Genographic Project in 2005 with the purpose of working collaboratively with different indigenous groups around the globe to collect DNA samples with the intention of learning more depth as to where we came from in our evolutionary migrations. This project allowed the Society to open it up to the general public as well, as a means of supporting the Genographic Legacy Fund.

The Public Participation Kits are expensive at $99 per kit, but are completely inclusive and cover the cost of processing the lab results and the proceeds go towards the Legacy Fund to help indigenous people revitalize their cultures. It is “directed primarily toward education initiatives, cultural conservation, and linguistic preservation and revitalization efforts” per the project director, Dr. Spencer Wells.

There are two separate kits, for two separate tests. If you are a woman you can only take the mitochondrial DNA test which traces your direct maternal ancestry. Men can take the mitochondrial DNA test or the Y-chromosome test, which traces your direct paternal ancestry. If you are a woman, and you have a close relative in your paternal line, like a father or brother, you can swab their DNA and get results that would be accurate for you as well.

It’s not going to tell you who you’re related to or who your ancestors were. It is going to tell you where your DNA links to groups and where they were and when they were there, like a general migration story back into history, with a professional portfolio detailing al of the information for you. And your results are constantly updated with more information as more samples are collected. The project samples are being collected until the end of 2011, but the Public Participation Kits will be available long-term, with the purpose of collecting more data and continuing to finance the Legacy Fund.

If you are someone who has no information with which to seek out personal ancestry, and it feels important to you to have a picture of your bloodline to help you tap into those energies, the Genographic Project might be a worthy investment to give yourself some tangible information to meditate with. The mysteries of our past live in our blood and are no longer so far out of reach.

Link: For more information, visit the National Geographic Genographic Project page...