DNA and ME
Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: DNA
I’m a bit of a sceptic when it comes to the virtues of DNA in genealogy, tending to the “Garbage In Garbage Out” way of thinking. What I mean is that the quality of the results you get from DNA testing is dependent on the quality of the database from which the results are produced. Every testing company has a different database, and every testing company’s results are selective. Some companies have more extensive databases, and those are the ones that produce “better” results, but the same DNA sample produces a different result depending on which company tested it. And I have no interest in discovering my far distant “ancient origins” and find those so-called results even more far-fetched. (There is a good article on this by The Legal Genealogist at https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2017/04/16/still-not-soup/)
But for all that I asked my brother, the last direct male in our patriarchal line, to take a DNA test, and have submitted it to one or two groups. We did just the Y-DNA test, which is most useful in finding people of the direct paternal line, thus people with the same surname. I have only paid for the 37-marker test and might get better matches if I paid for more testing, but so faar have found little of interest. I have some 120 people in the 2nd-4th cousin range, but none of whom seem to share any familiar surnames. I have contacted a few whose family trees suggested some known connection bt usually without gaining any new information. And I have had congenial email conversations with one or two very distantly related people around the world, which have been enjoyable.
But nothing very revealing, no direct cousin relationships, no new light on any family branches, no brick walls broken. So I will leave others to work through the mysteries of autosomes and mitochondria, SNPs and centi-Morgans, and stick with the tried and true methods of genealogy that I enjoy.
The DNA image used is from: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/16-dna-molecule-artwork-laguna-design.jpg