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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2007-10 > 1192835734


From: Gabriela Novak <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] Response to genetic genealogists from authors ofOct. 19thScience article
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:15:34 -0400
References: <BAY111-DAV106BC6CE414A4E8CC41DECB19F0@phx.gbl>
In-Reply-To: <BAY111-DAV106BC6CE414A4E8CC41DECB19F0@phx.gbl>


I always thought of the Czech Republic as the melting pot of Europe
anyway, so no identity lost here.
As was said so many times, in everyone's pedigree there is a king and
a beggar and everything in between. It's the adventure of learning
that is important. I would rather that my ancestors come from all
corners of the globe than from one tiny village. Wouldn't that make
for a fascinating tree?
Gabriela


On 19-Oct-07, at 6:55 PM, Lawrence Mayka wrote:

> Ironically, scurrilous media actually encourage exactly such
> identity loss.
>
> You may remember the ridiculous recent article in which English
> people were
> told that on the basis of autosomal "ancestry" testing, they
> weren't really
> English. They were given nonsensical percentages of south Asian,
> or Middle
> Eastern, or sub-Saharan ancestry, and then told that they weren't
> as English
> as they thought they were. It was sheer idiocy, of course.
>
> The best attitude, in my opinion, is to apply our American concept of
> nationality to a broader time frame. Here in the United States, we
> know
> very well that our ancestors came from elsewhere. That doesn't
> make us any
> less American! It simply means that many different "tribes"
> contributed to
> the building of our nation.
>
> That same concept, on a longer time scale, applies to Poland or
> India or
> Korea or any other country. The fact that my I1b patrilineal ancestor
> migrated north from the Balkans a couple thousand years ago did not
> make my
> grandfather any less Polish; nor does my Polish-American friend's
> I1a-UltraNorse membership mean that he must now consider himself
> Norwegian.
> _Every_ nation has been built through the contributions of multiple
> "tribes"--only the time scale differs from place to place. DNA
> testing can
> add to our knowledge of ourselves, but we must never act as if it
> takes away
> anything that we previously had.
>
>> [mailto:] On Behalf Of
>> Gabriela Novak
>> If one has so much at stake, as to lose his whole identity
>> because of
>> a DNA test that disproves one of his many ancestors being from a
>> specific group, then that person should probably not risk taking the
>> test in the first place.
>
>
>
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