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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2008-02 > 1203120824


From: "William Hurst" <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] FTDNA accidentally detects my baby's y-chromosome in myFGStest!
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:13:44 -0500
In-Reply-To: <e1ebc51f0802151551n2e89639cw8a7fc01fcb4e4a6f@mail.gmail.com>


Hi Brooke,

Very interesting story!

Can you tell us your HVR mutations? I see a lot of Ashkenazi samples in my K
Project.

Bill Hurst

>I just received a very funny phone call from Eileen Krause, the
>quality assurance manager at FamilyTreeDNA.com -- and that's "funny"
>as in both "funny ha-ha" *and* "funny weird".
>
>I was an early FTDNA customer and had been placed in mtDNA haplogroup
>H2* waaaay-back-when. At the time, I thought this was a bit odd,
>since I'm Ashkenazic, my documented direct-maternal line goes back to
>Warsaw before 1800, and yet nearly all of my mtDNA matches in the
>FTDNA database were Scots-Irish. But I wrote it off to a hypothesis
>that the large Scots trader presence in Poland and the Baltics in the
>16th-18th centuries had given me an ancestress who converted to
>Judaism, even though that seemed unlikely. Plus, haplogroup H2 (with
>no asterisk) does have a decent presence in the Middle East -- I think
>I've read it's about 10%? -- so maybe it even predated my many
>Scottish matches.
>
>In any case, last year I finally decided to upgrade my results to the
>full sequence mtDNA test. However, after several months of waiting
>for the results, FTDNA mailed me a C/D kit (i.e. a third and fourth
>sample collection) and said they needed to re-run the tests. I
>figured this was simply because in the 2+ years since I submitted my
>original sample kit, the DNA had been all extracted for use in the
>various other tests that have been run, such as the autosomal tests,
>and they just needed a fresh set of spit.
>
>But even months after having mailed back my C/D kit to FTDNA, no
>results were coming in, and the note in my "Pending Lab Results" tab
>still said that they were awaiting my C/D kit to be returned. Larry
>Mayka wrote about this very problem on this listserve a week or two
>ago; I was one of the two members in his Polish project to whom he was
>referring.
>
>A few minutes ago, I got a call on my cellphone from Eileen at FTDNA.
>She confirmed that the lab had indeed finally processed my C/D test
>kit and sheepishly mentioned that they were having two different
>problems with my mtDNA samples:
>
>1) The mtDNA in all four test kits (A, B, C, D) all matched each
>other; however, the sequence was not in haplogroup H2* -- or indeed,
>in haplogroup H at all! Apparently, the original test results,
>way-back-when, were labeled by hand -- and apparently mis-labeled at
>that. Oops! I don't know what my correct mtDNA haplogroup
>designation is, but she said I should be finding out in a few days
>time. I guess that means that someone else out there, another early
>customer *should* be in H2*, but isn't, and doesn't know it. That's a
>bit troubling, but I presume they're currently trying to figure out
>whose sample results got switched with mine. (If you're an early
>FTDNA customer with Scots-Irish maternal heritage but inexplicable
>mtDNA matches to Ashkenazic Jews, maybe it's really you?)
>
>AND, on to the more interesting discovery....
>
>2) Eileen hesitantly mentioned to me that they had found a
>y-chromosome during the FGS test. After an initial "uh?" reaction, I
>realized "oh! I was pregnant when I sent back in the C/D kit!" And
>indeed, I was about seven or eight months pregnant with my son when I
>sent it back to them; he was born in November, 2007 and is my first
>child. She sounded very surprised, but relieved, to hear the
>explanation. I guess the guys in the lab were worried either that
>they were dealing with seriously mis-labeled test kits, or that I was
>a woman with an undiagnosed case of AIS (i.e. looks female but is XY),
>or that there was fraud in the testee information, or God knows what
>must have been going through their poor minds. In any case, both my
>husband and my son already have their own test kits on file with FTDNA
>(yeah, I swabbed 'em), so if the lab wants to, I'm sure they can
>confirm that this was indeed my son's DNA that they accidentally
>picked up in my spit sample. Cool, huh?
>
>Note that it has been known for a few years now that you can pick up a
>faint y-chromosome (or rather, a few XY cells) inside a woman's blood
>if she is pregnant with a son; it's the same process by which some of
>the new super-early baby gender determination tests work, one of which
>is even sold online as a (somewhat controversial) home test kit. But
>since the average age of female genealogists is more likely to be in
>the grandmother age range than my first-time-mom age range, it's not
>surprising that the FTDNA lab hadn't seen this before.
>
>I just found the whole thing amusing, and thought you all might too. :-)
>
>
>- Brooke Schreier Ganz
>Los Angeles, California (currently on vacation in Boca Raton, Florida)
>
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