Science of Genetic DNA testing - You might love this free resource

Hey there permies,

It is your resident genealogist and historian William Wallace back for another episode of PermieScience.  Thank yiu for joining me.

Lineage is an odd thing, because I believe that we are much more complicated than many believe our histories to be.  One example of this is early American colonial times.  In my research, I have come to the conclusion that most who can trace to colonial times are able to find some sort of royal lineage.  When you find one royal line, you see connected to most of the world.

This type of paper lineage is useful, but faulty. If one written piece of lineage is incorrect, then the entire line of descent could be fraudulent.  This is why genetic DNA testing is superior. Over the decades, I have come to view myself as near an expert level of knowledge on bot paper and genetic ancestry topics. It is this knowledge that I am willing to share with permies, because permies and who doesn't love permies.

Share the knowledge? That sounds a bit egotistical.  At the lowest membership level the site that I use is free, but just gives limited results at that free level.  What I am offering in addition to explaining why and how dna is important, is that I can run anyone's dna file for them for free (with my top level account getting all data), and I will spend a little bit of time studying your data and interpreting what I see from it.

This is a very deep subject, so I am going to split this up into several posts so that it is easier for quotes and replies. Next I am going to describe in general the difference between the different types of DNA testing, and the different type of data interpretation that sites do.  If you already have dna results, you might find much more useful information from this new method that I am describing.

Love you permies

Edit for autocorrect

DNA testing is a magestic thing, but it can be very confusing for many.  Let me help guide you, explaining what the different types of tests are, and how you can get more results from tests that you have the results from.

DNA testing sites like ancestry DNA, my heritage, or 23 and me have risen in popularity. Many have heard about these, even though you might not understand what they are. These companies do one type of genetic test, a type called autosomal tasting.  The most common type of DNA test is called autosomal DNA tests, and gives you a countries at a percentage, suggesting you may be 23 percent Swedish or 48 percent English, with all of those adding to 100 percent. The difficulty with this type of data, is that there were many different groups of people who lived in England.  We effectively get zero information to link to. It is too generic to tell us much.

The second type of DNA test is haplogroup testing.  Whiel autosomal tests our entire genetic code from all of our ancestors, there are only two specific ljnes that haplogroup testing shows us.  Men can get ydna haplogroup tests which show their father's lineage, and the thousands of years of men before him lineage. Mine is a African E haplogroup where I somehow match men of the Lemba tribe, along with bantu, Zulu, Dogon, and Berber tribes. This male genetics is vastly unchanged for thousands of years. Both men and women can test mitochondrial dna for information about their mother and their mother's mother's lineage also back thousands of years.

For most people, haplogroup testing is NOT the best test, as it is highly specialized and gives less general information.  Where the new frontier of DNA testing is with the traditional autosomal tests like with ancestry DNA. We use those test results that people already have, and evaluate their DNA further.

Telling you what country you are related to is nice, but we get the most amount of data from comparing your personal genetics to the genetics of every single individual that we have unearthed with archeology and have been able to run dna testing.  Some of this data was damaged over time, but discoveries in the past few years have shown us that the inner ear keeps dna even in some of the worst conditions.

Let us take for example this one specific viking event where a group of vikings were attacked, they took refuge inside of a church, and the townspeople barred the doors and burnt the church.  The site that I use has matches in different sections.  You can view matches by the individual, or look at big events or locations with dna spotlight.  This particular one is a viking Oxford execution - images attached

What you will see is a list of different individual samples and my genetic distance from them. The lower the number, the more of his genetics that I have.  When a number is under ten genetic distance, we might suggest they could be a grandparent.  In reality, we might not descend from that person, but perhaps someone genetically similar like their brother, sister, or father. When the genetic distance gets very low, we can almost be assured of direct ancestry.

So how is this different?  If we just compared you to Sweden, that doesn't tell you much.  Here with this one little example we would be comparing you to many different family groups who all had someone burn at this horrible tragedy.  If you click show non matching samples, we can see there is a total of 33 samples in this tragedy to match to, and they say there are more that weren't found. "Among those thought to have been killed is Gunhilde, who was the sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, King of Denmark. Her remains have not yet been discovered. Her husband Pallig Tokesen, the Danish Ealdorman of Devonshire was also killed in the massacre. This triggered King Sweyn to head to Normandy, make a treaty with a Viking descendant of Rollo, and commence with a series of campaigns to invade England."

This is just one tiny little tale of history that is on that website, and it is far from my top match.  What mysteries could you unfold?  I can tell you that my results were much crazier than I had imagined.  The website that I use is called" mytrueancestry.com"

The website is feee, which is an important part of their business model.  This way they get as many samples as possible, because one of the neat features is measuring your ancestry to an individual versus everyone else in the world.  Wouldn't it be neat, it you were the person who had the most genetics of an ancient King or a warrior?  The bottlenecks here are that you'd only be top of all those who cared enough to get dna testing, and then a smaller percentage of those who cared enough to do external Dna interpretation on this website. But still, you might be the top sample.

This is a way that you might find some of your ancient identity.

I had no idea that I carried ancient Hungarian Bathory lineage.

Remember that I am willing to help, and to explain things to people.  If someone is interested in testing, I am willing to consult on which test is best for their situation, and also which companies that I suggest doing testing with.

This is such a fun topic

I went there.  That is not really my cup of tea.

I am not interested in ancient ancestry.

Thanks for sharing though.

We are related to almost all folks with ancestry from Jamestown ....

My Jamestown connection is very unique, as it is a man names Stephen hopkins who was shipwrecked on Bermuda instead of Jamestown.  They then built a ship and made it to Jamestown.

He stayed for a while as preachers assistant, and then back to England to bring family over on the mayflower.

Squanto stayed in his one bedroom house with Hopkins and his family.  Imagine the stories told

I hope others may find your links useful, William, and that genetic testing of all kinds becomes easier and less expensive to access.   I admit that, like Anne M., I'm not so interested in personal family lineage.  However, the greater and more affordable access to such services could be extremely useful to many in the Permie realm.   How many times do we find ourselves asking "What is wrong with my tomatoes?....Why are my cucumbers wilting?....what is causing these shothole spots on my kale leaves?"  And this doesn't even begin to address the possibilities that might impact questions like "Why are my chickens dying?,,,,,,Why does my horse seem so lethargic?......Why do *I* feel so lethargic?".    Although the DNA testing to which you refer is good for lineage analysis and even genetic testing for inherited diseases, such DNA-focused testing would miss whether or not you currently have COVID/poliovirus/influenza and other RNA-based infectious agents and may even miss some nuanced imbalances in the 'expression' of what exists in your DNA genome.  Thus, while organisms that we know of currently have DNA...that must go through an RNA intermediate to make protein....many viruses exist only as infectious agents with an RNA-only genome in their ability to multiply and spread.  A technology similar to the one that you likely describe but that targets all RNA in the sample (blood sample, plant tissue sample, soil sample, etc.)  currently bears the name "RNA-seq"  and can cast a wider net on the entities that it can identify.  If you happen to know of any reduced cost services that could receive, for example, a blood sample or soil sample or dried leaf sample and could produce a "highest count" read table for the identified gene sequences in that sample, that could be a game changer for the homesteader desiring to know what genetic/biological 'imbalances' might be affecting themselves or plants, animals, or fungi on their property.

An example of the use of this technology is detailed in the open access article here:  https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/11/6/239

A minor dream for me would be that we are able to drop a plant sample off at an extension office or blood sample off at any pharmacy and have the results appear in our email within a week.  Actually, not so unrealistic with the computing power and scale of sequencing infrastructure currently at hand.

Well there exists a genetic mutation on two lines of men which defies science.  There is much unknown about this mutation and it's purpose.

I am interested in family lineage just not past Jamestown.

What stopped me is the website wanted me to download DNA and Ancestry said that in doing that the DNA would not be preserved as it is on Ancestry.