Returning A Family Heirloom To Its Rightful Owners

Is it odd that my genealogical fantasies include stumbling across local, 19th Century glass negative plates at a 2nd hand market or that someone contacts me about some amazing long, lost family heirloom? Unfortunately, this hasn’t come true, but I was able to make it happen for a lucky lady in England!

Earlier this year I visited a 2nd cousin of mine who is into genealogy as much as I am and just before leaving she brought out the most amazing old book that she purchased from an antique dealer many years ago.

The large, earthy, marbled tome was a bit tattered, but it contained over 300 pages of musings, thoughts, poems and events of a woman living through the mid to latter half of the 1800s.

FamilyTreeDNA’s New Origins Estimates

So I checked my familytreeDNA origins results again last night after hearing they’d upgraded their population sample databases and there were some big changes!
Here’s my two to compare, one from last year and now.

Scandinavian has really shot up. Since this seems to be centred around Norway, I would expect a bit from my 2x GGF from the Viking-raided, Outer Hebrides in Scotland, but not this much, especially since I only inherited 19% of his granddaughters DNA! If it includes Danish Vikings then I could have a bit more from the Norfolk area, but still, it seems like a lot!

Annoyed that my Eastern European has dropped off, since that’s my direct maternal line to SW Poland, though it’s possible they had Germanic origins.

British seems quite low. Except for 2x GGP’s from Austro/Italy and Prussia, all my other lines are UK, though I suspect the Western European infiltrated through my Kent and Cornish lines.
South-east Euro has jumped, on other sites I was between 2-7% Mediterranean which seemed about right for my Austro-Italian 2x GGF.

Comparing between the different companies at AncestryDNA and 23andMe shows massive differences so we’re obviously still a fair way off the technology being accurate % wise.

My paper trail estimates are 53.12% English, 34.38% Scottish, 6.25% SW Polish & 6.25% Austro-Italian, so at least the locations are reflected in all the results!

The Basics of DNA Genealogy Explained

This post doesn’t encapsulate everything about DNA Genealogy but serves to cover some of the basics for people interested in taking a test.

So this is my attempt at explaining DNA Genealogy. These days it all makes sense to me but I remember it was a massive learning curve as I got my head around Haplogroups, Segments, Centimorgans, Genomes etc. I’m still learning new things about it even now and there are definitely a lot more people out there who really delve deep into it, but I will try and explain the basics to help you understand how it works and what you can expect.

There are currently 3 main DNA testing companies out there at the moment, that deal with the genealogy aspect of it. There are more but these 3 are the most well known. Ancestry.com (autosomal test only) 23andme.com (autosomal test only) and FamilytreeDNA.com (autosomal, yDNA (direct paternal) & mtDNA (direct maternal)).
There is a 4th company MyHeritage who have just started  DNA testing, but at this point in time I wouldn’t recommend them until they iron out some kinks and get a larger database.
All have their pro’s, con’s and various price differences.

A lot of people also upload their results from these 3 companies to Gedmatch.com which is a free site that allows people to compare tests against others from different companies and also has some pretty good tools to use.