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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2005-10 > 1128967107


From: "Glen Todd" <>
Subject: RE: [DNA] BGA Test
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 11:58:27 -0600
In-Reply-To: <8c.311fd720.307b78fa@aol.com>


> came from. Nothing more. I am puzzled by your consistent
> determination to characterize this as "feeling necessary
> to establish" or that someone such as myself would "get
> offended if they didn't find it." Now will you please

This is a personal hot button of mine. For reasons that aren't relevant to
this list, I am socio-politically somewhere between libertarian and
conservative, but I find myself regularly talking to 'leftist/progressive'
Politically Correct types. As a result I regularly find myself in
arguments over the fact that I don't seem to have any 'minority' ancestry,
much less vocally try to identify with such ancestry. The notorious
CU/Boulder professor Ward Churchill is a classic example of people who do.
In their minds - if one may stretch the definition of the term that far -
Europeans, and especially north-western Europeans, Germanics and
Scandinavians, are automatically racist, imperialist neo-Nazi oppressors of
all the 'real peoples' of the world, and they are pointed about being
offended by the fact that I not only acknowledge that apparently all of my
ethnic and cultural background is in that part of the world, but that I take
an active interest in that background rather than trying to be something
else that is in their eyes more 'Correct' and acceptable.

Combined with my own caustic and cynical nature, this has the effect of
making me sceptical of the motives of people who seem to want specifically
to find 'minority' ancestry in themselves, as well as the people who market
to such people. (After all, you're not very apt to see tests advertised
on say AfroAncestry offering to identify the European component of a
customer's ancestry, even though most people of such ancestry especially in
the US and Europe are likely to be high percentage mixtures. They'd
rather pretend that the Euro part of their ancestry didn't exist.)

And before anybody complains that the above is off topic, I said that it
would be. However, I was challenged on it on-list and felt that I ought to
answer. I'm by no means arguing against the creation of such tests, nor
am I saying that people ought not to take them. On the contrary, as should
be inferred from my overall involvement in the research aspect of this list,
it should be obvious that my desire is for such test to increase in
resolution to the point that they can provide biogeographically significant
information, such as for example in my case connections to specific
prehistoric Germanic tribes. (Ken has mentioned a couple of possibilities
related to one group that we're working on.)

My response to the specific question asked was NOT intended to be critical
of the technology in general, nor to suggest that it does not have
legitimate application, but rather to answer a specific question; to say
that for somebody of 'known' completely European ancestry a '100% European'
result (like mine) is useful in only a negative sense; by saying that there
are no non-'European' inclusions (at least in the past 10 generations or so,
which the AncestryByDNA site at least used to say was the effective limit of
resolution) it raises slightly the probability that the paper trail is in
fact accurate. Since I have an extensive paper trail going back 10+
generations for much of my tree (I'm from eastern Massachusetts, where
record keeping was a bit of an obsession), this was mildly interesting
information. My ancestry has two known components. One, accounting for
approximately sixty percent, is old line New England, going back to the
Great Migration of 1620-1670 from the British Isles. The second (6 out of
16 great-great-grandparents) is Irish immigrant in the 1850 period, probably
associated with the Potato Famine. The results of the BGA test are
entirely consistent with this, suggesting that if there were any FPEs or
similar incongruities in the paper trail, they were at least confined to the
same ethnic population.

Glen

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