Post by bingbong on Oct 27, 2007 15:12:38 GMT 12
Marie Antoinette, Is That You?
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By MICHELLE SLATALLA
Published: October 25, 2007
I WOULD like to apologize to any neighbors who walked by my house recently and happened to see me scraping the roof of my husband’s mouth with a cotton swab.
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Hadley Hooper
I’m really sorry he made such a fuss and refused to do it himself. But when he gets these fixed ideas about things — like DNA testing being a waste of time because who really cares about your ancestors who lived 10,000 years ago? — he can turn stubborn.
“You’re scratching me,” he whined.
“Oh, please,” I said. “How else are we going to figure out if you’re related to Jesse James? Or Genghis Khan?”
My husband replied: “Something tells me Mr. Khan is more likely to be your ancestor.”
Well, we would know soon enough. The plan (O.K., my plan) was to collect DNA samples and then mail off our saliva to Ancestry.com, the sprawling genealogy research site with 15 million users that last week announced it had added DNA testing to its collection of family history research tools.
In a nation of family history buffs, my desire to look into my DNA isn’t that unusual. A lot of people do it to find living relatives. Many African-Americans do it to find out where they came from before slavery.
My reason was simpler: I was ready to get to the bottom of my family tree because I had already explored all the higher branches. A few years back, in the course of writing a memoir, I had discovered the dirt on several generations, learning which family members had been adopted (in secrecy) and which “cousin” was really a half sister and how much great uncle Harry drank the night he was run over by a train. Now I hoped to figure out exactly what sort of hunter-gatherers had started my family down our path.
For amateur genealogists like me who want to delve into older mysteries, the thoroughly modern process of DNA testing can answer age-old questions, like which ancient branch — known as a haplogroup — of the world’s family tree you belong to and how your forebears fanned out from Africa to the rest of the world.
While I understood (in theory) that some people don’t share my compulsion to snoop in the business of the long dead, I needed my husband to cooperate. I wanted to compare his results with mine because I suspected his Y-DNA sample would reveal a lot more about his ancestors than my mitochondrial DNA say about mine.
Men can get a lot more out of DNA testing because they inherit both an X and a Y chromosome, enabling them to identify their paternal haplogroup and easily trace the history of paternal surnames. But women can only identify their maternal haplogroup, unless they use a sample from a close male relative like a brother or father. (Hey, Thanksgiving is coming up!)
Other sites — such as Nationalgeographic.com and Oxfordancestors.com — offer similar DNA tests that are a reliable way to reveal broad facts like, say, whether you have Native American or Asian ancestors. But scientists warn that it is best to shy away from sites that promise to pinpoint a specific region or country of origin, because in most cases the tests can’t uncover such specific details.
I chose Ancestry.com because it already has a user base of 15 million, more than 3 million of whom have posted their searchable family trees at the site. So I’m counting on the network effect.
The more Ancestry.com’s users who have their DNA tested, the more results there will be to compare to mine. Genetic matches will be posted on my results page — and then I will be able to e-mail like-minded historians to ask for more help solving the family-tree puzzle — so with luck I won’t have to be a detective alone for long.
Or, as Megan Smolenyak, a spokeswoman for Ancestry.com, explained it: “It’s basically a matchmaking game. You get a pile of numbers. I get a pile of numbers. And if they match, those people can become research buddies.”
For now, the database is small, comprising as of last week only 6,500 results from previous tests. So I didn’t really expect to find a long-lost cousin.
At this point, identifying one’s haplogroup, and thus your ancestors’ gradual migration, is the main benefit of the tests (which at Ancestry.com cost from $144 to $199).
While waiting for our swab results, I did a little research into the dozens of haplogroups into which the world’s population divided as it migrated. It was even possible that through testing I would identify celebrity relatives (both living and dead) I never knew I had.
Among the famous whose DNA has been tested is Marie Antoinette, who belonged to maternal Haplogroup H (along with about half of all Europeans).
Katie Couric (maternal Haplogroup K) is genetically linked to a 5,000-year-old iceman whose body was recently discovered in the Alps. And Jesse James? T2, a subgroup of maternal Haplogroup T.
Three weeks later, when the results came in, Mrs. Smolenyak phoned to recommend that I log in to the site to see them — and my husband lost a $20 bet that I was related to any historical tyrants.
My husband had 14 genetic matches; I had 2. This was a reflection of the fact that most people test for paternal lineage than for maternal. But even my husband’s matches were distant; the matches were people related to him within 70 generations.
NEITHER of our haplogroups put us in the same company as anyone famous like Czar Nicholas I or Katie Couric — or even Genghis Khan. My husband and his father (and his father and his father and his father) are descendants of Haplogroup J2, the people who thousands of years ago introduced farming to much of the then-known world.
As for me? I (and my mother and my grandmother and Hesta and her mother and her mother) are I’s. A map on Ancestry.com showed the I’s migration north from Africa through what is now Libya and Egypt and Turkey, to fan out through Russia and Europe.
“Honestly, I have group envy,” Ms. Smolenyak said. “I’d like to be an I, but I’m an H, which is much more common.”
She may have just been being kind. After all, Marie Antoinette was an H.
But what grabbed my eye on my test results page was a paragraph saying that the I’s reached Europe about 35,000 years ago.
“I’m a rare I,” I later informed my husband. “My family got to Europe 30,000 years before your family.”
“But without us, how would you ever have cultivated crops?” he asked, reading aloud from his results page.
Next, he wants to test his maternal lineage.
“Fine,” I said. But I bet he’s an H.
E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com
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By MICHELLE SLATALLA
Published: October 25, 2007
I WOULD like to apologize to any neighbors who walked by my house recently and happened to see me scraping the roof of my husband’s mouth with a cotton swab.
Skip to next paragraph
Hadley Hooper
I’m really sorry he made such a fuss and refused to do it himself. But when he gets these fixed ideas about things — like DNA testing being a waste of time because who really cares about your ancestors who lived 10,000 years ago? — he can turn stubborn.
“You’re scratching me,” he whined.
“Oh, please,” I said. “How else are we going to figure out if you’re related to Jesse James? Or Genghis Khan?”
My husband replied: “Something tells me Mr. Khan is more likely to be your ancestor.”
Well, we would know soon enough. The plan (O.K., my plan) was to collect DNA samples and then mail off our saliva to Ancestry.com, the sprawling genealogy research site with 15 million users that last week announced it had added DNA testing to its collection of family history research tools.
In a nation of family history buffs, my desire to look into my DNA isn’t that unusual. A lot of people do it to find living relatives. Many African-Americans do it to find out where they came from before slavery.
My reason was simpler: I was ready to get to the bottom of my family tree because I had already explored all the higher branches. A few years back, in the course of writing a memoir, I had discovered the dirt on several generations, learning which family members had been adopted (in secrecy) and which “cousin” was really a half sister and how much great uncle Harry drank the night he was run over by a train. Now I hoped to figure out exactly what sort of hunter-gatherers had started my family down our path.
For amateur genealogists like me who want to delve into older mysteries, the thoroughly modern process of DNA testing can answer age-old questions, like which ancient branch — known as a haplogroup — of the world’s family tree you belong to and how your forebears fanned out from Africa to the rest of the world.
While I understood (in theory) that some people don’t share my compulsion to snoop in the business of the long dead, I needed my husband to cooperate. I wanted to compare his results with mine because I suspected his Y-DNA sample would reveal a lot more about his ancestors than my mitochondrial DNA say about mine.
Men can get a lot more out of DNA testing because they inherit both an X and a Y chromosome, enabling them to identify their paternal haplogroup and easily trace the history of paternal surnames. But women can only identify their maternal haplogroup, unless they use a sample from a close male relative like a brother or father. (Hey, Thanksgiving is coming up!)
Other sites — such as Nationalgeographic.com and Oxfordancestors.com — offer similar DNA tests that are a reliable way to reveal broad facts like, say, whether you have Native American or Asian ancestors. But scientists warn that it is best to shy away from sites that promise to pinpoint a specific region or country of origin, because in most cases the tests can’t uncover such specific details.
I chose Ancestry.com because it already has a user base of 15 million, more than 3 million of whom have posted their searchable family trees at the site. So I’m counting on the network effect.
The more Ancestry.com’s users who have their DNA tested, the more results there will be to compare to mine. Genetic matches will be posted on my results page — and then I will be able to e-mail like-minded historians to ask for more help solving the family-tree puzzle — so with luck I won’t have to be a detective alone for long.
Or, as Megan Smolenyak, a spokeswoman for Ancestry.com, explained it: “It’s basically a matchmaking game. You get a pile of numbers. I get a pile of numbers. And if they match, those people can become research buddies.”
For now, the database is small, comprising as of last week only 6,500 results from previous tests. So I didn’t really expect to find a long-lost cousin.
At this point, identifying one’s haplogroup, and thus your ancestors’ gradual migration, is the main benefit of the tests (which at Ancestry.com cost from $144 to $199).
While waiting for our swab results, I did a little research into the dozens of haplogroups into which the world’s population divided as it migrated. It was even possible that through testing I would identify celebrity relatives (both living and dead) I never knew I had.
Among the famous whose DNA has been tested is Marie Antoinette, who belonged to maternal Haplogroup H (along with about half of all Europeans).
Katie Couric (maternal Haplogroup K) is genetically linked to a 5,000-year-old iceman whose body was recently discovered in the Alps. And Jesse James? T2, a subgroup of maternal Haplogroup T.
Three weeks later, when the results came in, Mrs. Smolenyak phoned to recommend that I log in to the site to see them — and my husband lost a $20 bet that I was related to any historical tyrants.
My husband had 14 genetic matches; I had 2. This was a reflection of the fact that most people test for paternal lineage than for maternal. But even my husband’s matches were distant; the matches were people related to him within 70 generations.
NEITHER of our haplogroups put us in the same company as anyone famous like Czar Nicholas I or Katie Couric — or even Genghis Khan. My husband and his father (and his father and his father and his father) are descendants of Haplogroup J2, the people who thousands of years ago introduced farming to much of the then-known world.
As for me? I (and my mother and my grandmother and Hesta and her mother and her mother) are I’s. A map on Ancestry.com showed the I’s migration north from Africa through what is now Libya and Egypt and Turkey, to fan out through Russia and Europe.
“Honestly, I have group envy,” Ms. Smolenyak said. “I’d like to be an I, but I’m an H, which is much more common.”
She may have just been being kind. After all, Marie Antoinette was an H.
But what grabbed my eye on my test results page was a paragraph saying that the I’s reached Europe about 35,000 years ago.
“I’m a rare I,” I later informed my husband. “My family got to Europe 30,000 years before your family.”
“But without us, how would you ever have cultivated crops?” he asked, reading aloud from his results page.
Next, he wants to test his maternal lineage.
“Fine,” I said. But I bet he’s an H.
E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com
