DNA update

 

I was attending the monthly BCGS meeting on Zoom a few evenings ago and idly checking out Ancestry on my other screen. As talk began about our upcoming anniversary cruise where well known DNA guru Blaine Bettinger will be our guest speaker, my thoughts turned to how I should be boning up on my own DNA research. So I checked out the DNA part of the Ancestry site. Interesting, there was an offer for me to learn more about my genetic makeup by adding Traits to my AncestryDNA results. I checked that out. (We were still in the business part of the meeting before the guest speaker started.) 

Traits looked interesting but so had the offer I'd received a few months before from Living DNA to find out if I had Viking DNA. That also had a small cost, similar to the Ancestry Traits offer. The Viking results hadn't told me much I didn't already know. I'm still on the fence over adding Traits on Ancestry.

Still thinking about the offer and still in the DNA part of the Ancestry website, I clicked on DNA Story. The recent addition of Ethnicity Inheritance which split the inheritance from parents into two so that it was possible to see which ethnicities came from Parent 1 or Parent 2 had fascinated me. What I had inherited from each parent mostly went back to UK populations but there was enough difference that, having taken their family lines back through documented genealogy, I was able to determine who Parent 1 was and who Parent 2 was. That was cool and looked like it should help in some way.

At the time I shelved that idea, thinking I would get to it later. Well, it looks like waiting was actually a good thing. Ancestry, which never before broke down the data into chromosomes, now had a Chromosome Painter in Beta. What's more, they had carried the ethnicities from Parent 1 and Parent 2 onto this chromosome chart so that you could see which region and which parent each of the chromosomes came from. I think I should explore this further. It looks like this could have amazing possibilities.

  

Sources:

https://www.ancestry.ca/dna Ancestry DNA – DNA Story