I didn't know you could be part killer whale.

I like that all the neolithic cultures sound like roller derby teams.

Had search engines not been invented, I would have spent more than a minute thinking Charlie was a killer whale.

But exactly the same amount of time being pwned.

Can I still use "GEDmatch" for my dating site for high school drop outs?

My cousin keeps trying to get me and the other cousins to do the Ancestry thing for DNA. She's doing all kinds of genealogy stuff.

She thinks you're a serial killer.

She thinks one of us is a serial killer. It might not be me.

No, she told me it's you.

I know you're lying because you didn't go to Yale and because my family is worried I'll become a spree killer, not a serial killer.

I only admit that I wasn't a legacy admit at Yale.

I wasn't a legacy admit at Yale and Harvard.

Only Harvard?

They also have some pretty neat chromosome painting apps, so you get to see which stretch of which chromosome has how much of the South Asian looking DNA. Another place where the underlying science is just way over my head.

The models pretty consistently find 1% or so Native American, and since I can, with GEDmatch and another service, often figure out with whom in the database I share a longish sequence on a given chromosome with, it seems like it ought to be possible to identify -- say down to the 16th ancestry level (that is, from which gggparent) -- where this 1% comes from. Unlike tracking South Asian, or any Neolithic Farmers, it would seem to be that figuring out the source of Native American DNA ought to be a lot easier, since we're talking about a fairly limited stretch of the historical period.

I have heard rumblings in the distance that my family tree has proved less lily-white than previously thought. Haven't yet seen the corroborating documents though. The DNA thing will be interesting to do someday.

I would want to know how many people there models find 1% Native American for. Because if they don't have many Native American people in their sample, that could be an artifact of the method.

I suppose I am a little curious. My grandma was Sicilian, so I think that is a pretty wide set of potential ancestral groups. My grandfather was mainland Italian but had freckles and red hair. I suppose that's not Latin.

15 I'd think that would also be in the historical period, and so maybe readily traceable.

The incentives for it to not be traceable would have been very high, no?

17 On paper, my* ancestors include a Spanish woman who came to England in the 14th century as a lady-in-waiting for John of Gaunt. And she, apparently, had some Moorish ancestry. Odds against my having ended up with any DNA from her seem astronomical.

* Me and about 50 million other people in the Anglosphere.

But with Sicily. it wasn't just one or two immigrants. There were, I think, large influxes at various times in the historical period.

19 It seems to me that the children and grandchildren of a mixed race couple in the Anglosphere in the historical period might well have been remarked upon, and that the cover story for explaining away the non-white partner is going to be weakly documented.

(John of Gaunt's Spanish wife, I should say)

Lots of Greeks settled on Sicily and southern Italy. "Moby the Greek" could be my bookie name.

I wonder if they'd be able to tell the difference between DNA from Greek colonists to Sicily and Neolithic settlers thre.

22: That's true, but I wonder how far down the social scale that happened.

Not to insult Missy's ancestors.

Fucking phone.

But, assuming we're still early in reading what the genome has to tell us about prehistory, it does seem kind of cool.

At risk of being a killjoy, it doesn't to me. I really don't see the point of this. It appears you have a lot more interest in genealogy than I do, to be fair, so I can understand it to a certain extent. But even so, I already know I have a mix of European ancestry, so what does this actually add? And what am I supposed to do with the information?

I'm also a little surprised that you're comfortable uploading your DNA to a public database. Don't come complaining to us when you get tagged as a false positive in a murder case.

If he gets tagged as a true positive, go ahead and complain.

I was gonna say, CC, that you might be outing a cousin as a serial killer. I guess that's not a bad thing.

My Mom did genetic testing. Our family lore had it that a ggfather married a "Mary Fell", who was a Cherokee princess, and for the shame of it, their daughter burned their family Bible with extensive family tree. However, neither Cherokee nor African-American, nor anything besides English/German showed up. So now we don't know why the daughter burned the family Bible.

31: Maybe because she told everyone that she was part-Cherokee and she had to destroy the evidence that she wasn't.

Germans are prone to arson.

The English aren't as genetically inclined to arson because they are adapted to cruise on a very damp island.

My Dad enjoyed genealogy, and began researching and documenting relatively early -- like in college and immediately after. He killed any enthusiasm I had for it with his "strew papers everywhere" working style.

In the 2000s, he came back for another determined stint, and really got excited about exchanging ancestors and research lines with other distant cousins who were researching their own related families. But he started working "probables" and overlaps and likelies into the history based on other people's research, so it drifts more into structured myth as you go back.

My interest is if you can tie stories or experiences to the ancestors, breathe life into them as people, not just a succession of names. He had a few stories (an Alaskan gold rush great uncle, family lore from the 1820s frontier), but that wasn't his interest, so he never got it collected and written down.

29.1 -- It's just more evidence of the timing and origin of various European migrations. One is either interested in pre-history or one isn't.

29.2 -- I've thought a lot about that, and the downside risks just don't seem all that compelling. I'm hoping I have enough other alibi evidence. Also, I can delete the files, and if I become convinced that I need to do that I will. Unlike, apparently, a great number of my countrymen, I have a pretty high threshold for paranoia. I'm not afraid that MS-13 is going to knock my door down, or, when I lived in DC, that some crack dealer was going to shoot me as I went to the grocery store, just for the fun of it. I'm not discounting in any way to any degree the fear that many women have of going out alone at night. Or during the day. I'm just not at all afraid of being falsely accused of a crime.

I'm just not at all afraid of being falsely accused of a crime.

I never worried about that either.

It's more socially acceptable to say you're worried about being falsely accused of a crime than to admit you'd just like to keep your options open in case you want to commit one.

Not exactly my field, but I know a little-- basically, we can only infer genotypes of hypothesized ancestral populations, usually from people who are alive now. There's no possibility to genotype Aztec speakers 1000 years ago.

Since we don't know migration pattern or population growth rates, extrapolating from current genetic variation involves modeling with some free parameters.

HapMap is the large effort to understand current population variation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_HapMap_Project

There's a succesor project, 1000 genomes, more poplutions assayed. Cavalli-Sforza's book "History and Geography of human genomes" while dated provides in my opinion a pretty good methodological introduction, accesible to anyone with a little math and genetics. The maps are interesting even for people unintersted in methods.

I spent the summer abusing my aunt's ancestry account, but I haven't done the DNA test yet. The most striking thing about the DNA to me is stuff like this:
https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/whos-more-irish-you-or-your-sibling/

One sister of the three has almost no indication of western European ancestry; the other three do, ranging from 5% to 32%. This makes it seem hard, to me, to determine what is or isn't there past a certain point, whatever that point might be, since entire groups might get sorted out of the pool within an individual (maybe the only individual willing to get tested).

My sister speculates that we would be really divergent on the genetic level for full siblings -- as I have no doubt that we are, but we have wildly different body types and personalities. I also worry a little about the Parkinson's risk -- my maternal grandfather died of it and, from the conveniently public Texas death certificates I studied this summer, I learned that a paternal great-grandfather also suffered from "Parkinsonism" (although he died of a stroke, I think). My mom and all her siblings seem unaffected, though. I too will drink as much coffee as possible to protect myself.

35 I'm with you on narratives, and with the tendency of a bunch of folks to drift into myth. It's a truly extraordinary person who can be documented in the 16th century in England or France; on the other hand if you hit one of these people, and they're documented because they were at least minor landowners, then maybe you'll be able to get a narrow strand going back another century or more.

My current thinking is that at the 8,000 ancestor level (however many generations that is) I have maybe 8 people who meet that criterion. So, .1% of my ancestry can be reliably traced even a generation or two prior to the colonial settlement period. If I believed stupid people on the internet, that number would be maybe 25 or so.

Still, you have to find the people to find the narratives, and, as a hobby, you have to apportion time between finding people you don't know about and finding narratives for the people you do know about.

One point of DNA is to test myths. As noted, I was hoping to identify some 18th century wives. It's not really effective for that, because of clustering. For example, all French Canadians are related, so it's really hard to say, on the current record, that Francois was the son of Anselme and Elisabeth, as opposed to being the son of a third cousin of Anselme, and some third cousin of Elisabeth.

On the other hand, I've been stymied figuring out which of the mid-20th century Smiths in Winnipeg are descendants of the Smith who married my grandmother's second cousin, and with DNA to find an individual, and a whole lot of other stuff, it's possible to get pretty far down that road.

Record keeping, and sharing, is very different from one place to another. French Canada is basically the best of anywhere I look. English Canada is almost as bad as the American South.

40 That's why I think Megan may yet have a Cherokee princess back there, although more likely a few more generations removed. OK, 'Cherokee princess' is always a red flag but there must have been some of them . . .

39 The different models give different results, which is also pretty interesting. In another 25 years, new models will have emerged that better fit what's knowable and known.

The non-lilyism in question was supposedly 20th century, so presumably documented (and definitely kept quiet).

36: I'm interested in prehistory, just not my personal relationship to it, because it's basically the same as everyone else's in the aggregate.

And your results aren't evidence of that prehistory, surely. They're an inference about you based on the evidence about prehistory. Personally, I'm interested in the evidence, not the inference.

I'm with 29 on the un-interestingness of the genetic genealogy ethnicity estimates (but not the other stuff). That is usually the least interesting part of the DNA testing to me. Of course, I am also about 100% British Isles/NW Europe. I find GEDMatch's admixture utilities to be very uninteresting. Right now AncestryDNA, thanks to its massive database, probably has one of the best ethnicity estimates. The ethnicity estimates are good for large-scale issues, like when my friend who thought she was 100% Italian found out she was half Italian, half "European Jewish" (aka Ashkenazi). I've also used it to help people who're adopted figure out ancestors. But I don't really consider numbers under 10% useful, nor do I distinguish too much among Scandinavian and Western Europe and Germanic and NW Europe and British Isles. This is a small area, geographically, and there was migration.

I spent the summer helping 3 people find their biological parents. It's scary stuff in a way, really life-changing for the people involved. Sometimes there are happy endings and you go meet you biological father at his mountain retreat in Idaho. Sometimes you find out your great-grandmother ran a brothel in Queens or your biological uncle was a Satanic worshipper who fathered children just to kill them. It's a crapshoot.

I'm being coy for no particular reason, so. My grandfather was known to be illegitimate (the family "secret") but it seems now that the secret under the secret was that the unknown father was Coloured not white, and my grandfather at some point got himself reclassified as white (as one could).
Somewhat to GY's position (which I basically share) I think this kind of interesting in the effect it'll have on my father and his siblings (all fairly hardcore racists). Everyone in that generation has so far been conspicuously silent, so...
All this though remains kind of hypothetical for me until I get my scatterbrained cousins to show me evidence.

I bet if you could stick entire families in the models you would get better results. I wonder if anyone has developed models like that.

Also, with biometric surveillance piece. Some time ago I posted a thing about USAID in Central America. One of the things you pay for is school psychologists, and one of the things they found was lots of father-daughter rape (and consequent children) in rural areas. Population-level DNA databases potentially could catch things like that.

48. That's CEPH, basically

Record keeping, and sharing, is very different from one place to another.

Indeed. My impression is that Irish record keeping (by the subjugators, anyway) was pretty good until somebody decided the records hall was a great place to fortify for a last stand.

Orcadian history is very weird, and probably has some strong founder effects. In the DNA surveys of Those Isles I've seen, Orkney usually stands out as one or more distinct groups.

I find GEDMatch's admixture utilities to be very uninteresting.

You're a scientist, and so the brightly colored artwork isn't going to appeal in the same way it does to a dope.

Oh, I was thinking of someone else.

But I don't really consider numbers under 10% useful

I am TOO 2% Neanderthal.

Also, am I right that you are not the same commenter as Ydnew? The email addresses are different, (but the voice reads very similar).

And I was definitely of the view that numbers under 5-10% are meaningless, until I found that you can isolate that 1% to a couple of discrete spots on a couple of chromosomes, and at the same time identify those same spots with particular people with identifiable shared ancestors.

Is it not the case that if the painting utility using a particular model puts the Native bits in the same smallish strand of Chromosome 22 that I share with person X -- and it's not 1% of that shared strand, but extends over maybe half of it -- that we've learned something? We look and see that person X and I share a 5th generation ancestor -- it's not conclusive, but isn't it suggestive? Or is this just way out on a limb for what the current models are telling us?

Sometimes you find out your great-grandmother ran a brothel in Queens or your biological uncle was a Satanic worshipper who fathered children just to kill them.

Wait a minute, how often do you find out that second one?

More often than you find out he was your direct ancestor.

Okay, my story, hopefully not too dull.

My situation was a little closer to "looking for birth family" -- the mystery of my paternal grandfather, who wasn't himself terribly interesting (ditched wife & kids, drank himself to death), but who was surrounded by unknowns. I learned of my dad's cancer diagnosis around the time that the family separation policy was in the news, and so part of it was also a meditation on the border, since my grandfather was born in San Antonio and lived most of his life in Brownsville. (Ritually cursing Texas has been part of my family culture forever.) I didn't know that his mother had been born in Monterrey, or that *her* mother was a French-Jewish immigrant born in Argentina and raised mostly in Mexico (after she married, her parents and sister moved to Guatemala City). My great-grandmother got pregnant as a teenager in San Antonio; she married the guy, they had another kid -- my grandfather -- and then split up. My great-grandfather then married an Anglo-Texan woman from Abilene and they seem to have raised the two boys, along with a third son of their own, until my grandfather went off to live with his bio mother in adolescence. When the stepmother died her obituary listed the two stepsons as her own sons. My great-grandmother moved back to San Antonio pretty soon after her ex-husband died -- she had lived outside Texas since the divorce -- and spent the last eight years of her life there.

I don't think, in all those records, I can really find the answer to the question of what went wrong or whom to blame. I corresponded with extremely friendly distant relatives in Argentina and here in Sacramento, who filled me in on the Latin American-Jewish piece of the story -- far more gratifyingly exotic than the slaveowners in Louisiana or real estate speculators from Bremen. Parts of it had a personal resonance that was pretty uncanny. I don't know how I feel about Texas: more connected, less connected? Less connected-in-a-bad-way? I think "more connected."

Boy, your family was really in my backyard.

My family is either really dull or good at covering up stuff.

55. Need to know more about how likely that shared stretch is for 2 random europeans and also for 2 random Native Americans. If it's very unlikely to be European, then informative. IMO, figuring out that likelihood from current populations is not going to be reliable in general. There may be circumstances where it works well, but the details of the calculations are necessary to draw a conclusion.

My family thought my family was good at covering stuff up until CharleyCarp got ahold of my grandfather's secret life.

I feel like my ancestors are going to be disappointed that I don't have a secret family.

Need I say be the change?

But now it's too easy to prove paternity. Also, I'm really tired much of the time.

Not exactly my field, but I know a little-- basically, we can only infer genotypes of hypothesized ancestral populations, usually from people who are alive now. There's no possibility to genotype Aztec speakers 1000 years ago.

Well, it is possible to extract DNA from ancient remains, though the level of preservation varies a lot and you often aren't able to reconstruct a full genome. And of course you can't tell what language they spoke without some sort of additional evidence. I don't know if the models Charley is talking about are grounded in this sort of research or not.

In today's "kids don't know the acronyms of the past" news, it appears my brother-in-law's new venture is called SOL.

How do they distinguish European "hunter-gatherers"? Is that what they label Basque genes?

58 Not dull at all.

You don't need to have a very large group of people at all to find some not dull and not boring narratives out there.

Maybe a low threshold for boredom helps: I had no idea growing up that I had any relatives in Canada at all. Now, I find that more than half my living fourth cousins are Canadians Not only was my mom's Canadian third cousin a first round pick in the NHL draft in the mid-60s, but we probably saw him play our Fort Worth Wings while he was on an NHL farm team in the same league. Anyway, emigrating to northern Saskatchewan from western Iowa in the early 20th century is the sort of thing you'd think would be backed up by a real story.

68: The ones without agriculture.

67: Don't they google acronyms?

66 They have functions where you can compare your DNA to that which has been derived from a couple dozen prehistoric people. Different models are using different ways to judge DNA, and each has a ton of literature to back it up. There's actual science behind the brightly colored chromosome diagrams, but I'd think that 25 or 50 years hence what we have now will be considered (a) quaint and (b) ridiculously wrong.

41: I can do that on my mother's side - especially her mother's mother, because they kept genealogies as they went.

On the Fairbanks side, I can trace it back to Jonathan Fairbanks whose house 17th century house still stands in Dedham, MA.

He was the child of his father's 2nd wife, and because she died in. Childbirth her son was basically disinherited - inheriting money but no land. At least tgat's What the museum's curator told me. They probably can track a generation or two back.

71: My guess is they figured, well, every possible combination of letters has an urban dictionary entry, without realizing that nope, that one was really common.

66. Sure-- the word I see for that is paleogenomics. Mostly mito that I've seen for anatomically modern human remains, from which it's hard to infer ancestry.

Analysis of crop and animal domestication with similar techniques can draw stronger conclusions, I think because there's a lot more variation to work with, so even assays with poor signal to noise can be conclusive.

Here in Virginia, we don't want some DNA test ruining our firmly held beliefs about how important we are bc of who we believe our ancestors were.

Mostly mito that I've seen for anatomically modern human remains, from which it's hard to infer ancestry.

Yeah, mostly mitochondrial, in part because there are so many more copies so the preservation conditions are more favorable. Definitely a very broad-brush approach. There have also been some whole-genome studies of exceptionally well-preserved remains, which have provided a lot of information that is difficult to interpret (as is true of the modern studies).

59: also Houston, if your backyard extends that far. There was one brief record of my grandfather's birth family living together in Austin pre-divorce (1920 census), and I looked it up on Google Maps just for fun: condo construction in all directions.

The New Yorker has informed me (via Alejandro Escovedo profile) that Dallas is hip now, which probably definitively means I am not, and not just because I remember details like this from my avid New Yorker consumption.

My wife and I have both done the DNA kits (the original NatGeo ones), and they didn't reveal anything surprising. She has some Cherokee ancestors (which we knew already and is documented in Cherokee tribal genealogies) and I have some Jewish ancestors (which we knew already, though there are no records earlier than about 1780 of them). We were also able to figure out the truth about a couple of "distinguished ancestor" legends that were widely believed in our extended family but turned out to be less exciting and more about exaggeration once you looked into the details.

Several members of our respective parental families were into genealogy, so we had extensive resources even before Ancestry, etc. By the way, family trees on Ancestry and the other similar sites are mostly self-curated, so you can't be sure that you're getting is from verified sources or is just family legends.

I just copied mine from the appendix of Return of the King.

79.last: yeah, I stopped using them after I traced myself back to Charlemagne three different ways. That isn't particularly surprising--if you have any European ancestry, you probably are descended from him. But that's only going to be documented for nobles. If you aren't actually noble yourself, the hard/unlikely part is finding documentation of your peasant/burgher ancestors had noble parents.

Ancestry.com is particularly bad because it encourages you to record every speculation in much the say way you would a well verified fact. If enough people do that and also make said speculations public, bad data chases out good.

I have one ancestor I'm curious about. Came here from Scotland in the 1760s. I know he was some sort of elite or at least bourgeois. But all my lines go back to "this person came to the US in this year", not anything from the old country.

1740 is really pushing it for schmoes like my Scots ancestors, but someone with money/property might well show up in the various records. Wills, administrations, etc. His mom might have come from a rung higher, in which case documentation is easier, or a rung lower, in which case you might be out of luck.

User curated trees should be treated as hints at possibilities, nothing more.

I am highly skeptical of the findings of Native American ancestry, and dna testing generally, since my adopted son received his results. He was given 5% Native American ancestry. He was born in Westrrn Kazakhstan near the Russia border, in a region with zero historical U.S. presence.

To be fair he was 45% Russian and 40% Turkic/Uralic, which is plausible.

Could be Yeniseian?

85: Possibly. More likely, whatever markers they're calling "Native American" actually go back further than the peopling of the Americas and are also present in distantly related groups of Siberia and Central Asia.

Couple things I noticed on ancestry: 1) it didn't do validation on things like a parent-child relationship being impossible because parent died thirty years before child was born, or parent was 8 when child was born; 2) the tree building UI didn't handle cousin marriages very well. I can't remember the exact configuration, but I couldn't get it to make someone's niece also their sister-in-law or whatever. That was disappointing.

It was utterly and idiotically addictive, like playing Tetris.

.

Lots of people don't handle cousin marriage very well.

Aunts and uncles, for example.

As I understand it, in the 18th century, they didn't mind because it saved money.

Like tuperware or paying off your credit card in full at the end of the statement period.

Vituperware for your spite house!

In fact, if you save your leftovers and don't carry a balance on your credit card, it's virtually certain your genetic heritage was decisively influenced by generations of cousin marriage.

52-4: Different person. Do I really sound like that?! (Kidding, in the vein of no one liking a recording of their voice.)

I think genealogy as practiced by my family is terribly dull, but no one has yet unearthed any unexpected or scandalous results. I can imagine lots of situations where it would be much more interesting, but as far as I can tell, it's WASPs all the way down for me.

And if your aunt or uncle gives you one of those vacuum food saver things for a gift, you'd better go to the next family gathering with your eyes wide open.

94 So I learned from DNA that my dad's second cousin gave up a kid for adoption when she was 17. Her later born son had no idea, nor did anyone else now alive. The kid is in her late 60s now, and went to some effort to find her birth family.

Just prior to the advent of DNA use, several of us figured out one of those two-family things. It was a serial deal -- guy leaves Iowa goes to sea in the 1880s, gets a gal pregnant in Australia, marries her, then ditches. She spends some years writing letters to various places looking for him, calls herself a widow and remarries. He never tells anyone in the US, marries in Iowa and has a new family that he ditches after 5 kids are born.

WASPs all.

||

Speaking of WASPs, a Minn legal publication has a short feature on my brother, including this exchange:

Q. What if any is your favorite depiction of the law, the legal professional in popular culture?

A. My absolute favorite is "Njal's Saga," a medieval Icelandic narrative set at the turn of the 11th century. The story focuses on three kinds of dispute resolution: feuding, arbitration and litigation.

|>

97 That's great

Yeah, pop culture.

99. It stayed at the top of the saga charts for seven consecutive weeks in 1087, don't knock it.

96: Ours is more like, "So, I thought this John was Elizabeth's son, but it looks like he's actually Mary's son and Elizabeth's brother! Man, those church records in rural Maine are tricky! Glad we made the trip up!" Not DNA-based, of course, and I suppose finding unexpected connections might be surprising, but still very very boring so far.

I'm vaguely interested in doing one of those DNA profiles. I'm generally not super interested in family history. I have an uncle who has dug a lot into it, though.

I know for a fact that within the immediate four generations on both sides of my family, there's either an adoption, or a case where the father on the birth certificate is definitely not the actual father (because the father on the birth certificate died a year or so before the child was born).*

So, there's the possibility that I'd find out something interesting or novel about my genetic ancestry (with the usual caveats, etc), and I'm just generally interested in that sort of thing (anthropology, population movement, etc).

I'd assume, otherwise, that it's (Scottish, Welsh, and Irish) Celts and Anglo-Saxon and/or Norse all the way back, though, as my family are basically English/Welsh** on one side, and Scottish/Irish*** on the other.

* the uncle who researches this stuff thinks that the ancestor in question started up with a new man after her husband died, and subsequently married that man, but doesn't know if the child born in between was either the new man's child, but they used her "husband"'s name on the certificate because they hadn't married yet, or the child of some other in-betweener.

** Londoners and Northeners but probably mostly from the Welsh borders at some point a few hundred years before.
*** 19th c. immigrants from Ulster to Glasgow, probably.

Presumably, the person recording the birth either held pre-modern views on gestation or there was some social norm about which fictions should be maintained to keep social order.

Njaj's saga comes up in dsquared's book

81. "I stopped using them after I traced myself back to Charlemagne three different ways."

Well, actually you aren't the first. If you are distantly descended from any titled person, you will probably find someone super-exciting and special deep in your family tree. Why is that? It turns out that back in the day if you got ennobled, the first thing you did is hire someone to write up your ancestral line. That someone had every incentive to find you related to Charlemagne or William the Conqueror or some other famous person. This is how pretty much every "noble" family tree was constructed.

In my case, an ancestor actually was one of Bill the C.'s buddies and married into his extended family and got a title. As a Viking freebooter his ancestry was "credibly" traced back to one of the Viking Rus. We have a real family coat of arms and everything! (Not one of those fake ones you can buy for $100 on the web, either.)

I am probably 10,000,000th in line for the British throne as a result, assuming (*cough*) the truth of that account, which is of course a segment of the same background that the House of Windsor has, so it must be true, right?

97: Njal's Saga has the most psychologically true moment in all of medieval literature. A fortuneteller tells some of the characters that they are going to be burned alive in their house, and that the straw they keep right outside the house is what's going to be used to burn it down. They think "We should move that straw," but then procrastinate on doing it until they actually do get burned alive. That's the one time reading medieval literature where I thought "These are my people. That is exactly what I would have done."

Greek mythology has it that trying to avoid your fate is what triggers your fate, so maybe they were just well read.

Greek mythology has it that trying to avoid your fate is what triggers your fate, so maybe they were just well read.

Stupid Gemini.

But people in Greek tragedy are much more vigorous. Oedipus runs away and gets to murdering and marrying. The people in that house put off fixing their problems until tomorrow. (Njal's saga is full of other murdering for revenge, however.

There's another character in Njal's saga who gets murdered because instead of running away when his life is in danger, he can't bear to leave his house because the wheat fields are so beautiful. Wheat!

Fear of gluten didn't exist then.

I am probably 10,000,000th in line for the British throne as a result

To be in the queue for Buck House you need to be descended from Sophia of Hanover. (stipulated by act of parliament). She only died in 1714, so you should be able to find out.

110.last https://youtu.be/Tt2JVOrAZGU

110.last And AIHMHB, I have seen some very beautiful fields of wheat in my time.

Like Amber, you wave at grain.

112. That's disheartening. The ancestor through whom I'm connected to the royal family came over to the future US of A when Sophia of Hanover was still a child.

Perhaps I will convert to supporting the Stuarts. Or is there a Plantagenet Pretender out there somewhere?

I think, statistically, something like 1/3 of the population of the UK has a royal ancestor in the not amazingly distant past.

then procrastinate on doing it until they actually do get burned alive

The disaster prevention people read this and weep.

106: My personal favorite relatable moment is from Wolfram's Parzival. At one point Parzival has ridden into a besieged town -- the casus belli is that the lady Condwiramurs (whom he eventually marries) has refused a suit from Clamide, presumably because a dude named Clamide can't catch a break. The siege has lasted a while and everyone in the town is hungry. Wolfram describes this in vivid terms, relating how the happy sounds of frying doughnuts from the famous doughnut town of Wassertrüdingen haven't gladdened anyone's ears in a while. This leads him briefly to derail the story, thinking about how there are totally no doughnuts in his house either [the mice have nothing to steal], before he pulls himself together (enough complaining, on with the tale). A footnote tells us that Wassertrüdingen was not far from Eschenbach, so one presumes that he took a writing/dictating break and made a special trip down there at this point.

Is Njalssaga better than the Laexdalasaga? Because that totally sucked.

OT: What's the difference between "Resort Casual" and "Resort Evening Casual"? A navy blazer?

A mountain (kind of) resort, not a beach.

Mountain resort evening casual: clip a spray bottle to your belt to keep the cougars away.

That's only west coast mountains.

Cowboy boots should be shined for the evening event.

Which is true regardless of the other elements of the dress code.

121: Pants.

If I were meant to wear pants, they'd have been mentioned in the Bible

God likes shorts.

Exodus 28:42: "And thou shalt make them linen breeches to cover their nakedness; from the loins even unto the thighs they shall reach."

Jesus didn't wear pants.

Moby, I gave you a straight line with "cougars" and this is how you repay me?

119: Amazing indeed.

131: I don't joke about our diminishing wildlife.

117. Those royals are a fecund bunch. Not up to Jengis Khan standards, though.

129: Who likes short shorts? The LORD likes short shorts.

135: A truly awesome God.

116: There's a Plantagenet Pretender in Australia. It is not known to this author whether he is venomous or poisonous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Abney-Hastings,_15th_Earl_of_Loudoun

Ezekiel goes on about shorts that keep you from sweating while in the holy place (the place to be rebuilt that is) also, if I remember right. So it's not just length but especially fabric choice.

We can only wonder at which Babylonian exile era manscaping innovations would have been possible and so would have been recorded, if only they had today's better barbering technology.

||

I had a student exclaim, "It's a swastika!" in a pleased tone, in class just now. It turned out that he'd skewered several pieces of fruit on to a drink stirrer, and meant to say shish-kabob.

|>

120: Njal's saga is considerably better than Laexdela saga. It's pretty tightly constructed around its theme -- revenge is awesome, but leads an endless escalation of violence.

139: Oy!

And I need to let the police know that Turkish restaurant isn't a Nazi front.

Question for Mr. Carp:

AncestryDNA recently updated its ethnicity estimates. They now have my estimate as "100% Ireland and Scotland," with "Munster, Ireland" highlighted as an area from which I should assume an ancestral connection (this totally fits with the old-fashioned, documents-based research I have done on my father's side of the family, btw: Tipperary, Limerick, etc).

But I know that I also have some French/French-Canadian ancestry on the maternal side, and I have all sorts of DNA matches to a bunch of distant French-Canadian cousins.

So: what happened to my French ancestry in this updated ethnicity estimates profile?

Flight of the Wild Geese meant that the "French" were of Irish ancestry?

All your French ancestors were from Breton?

-from

140: Thanks.

All your French ancestors were from Breton?

Nope. My favourite French ancestor, Toussaint [because why choose just one saint when can have them all?!] Dubeau, was born at Paris in 1641. And yeah, the French records for everyday peasants such as my own ancestrals, are pretty much amazing.

For most of my ancestors (Irish), though, the records are sparse to non-existent. It's almost like Ireland was a subjugated territory of the British dominions, or something like that...

148 is me.

148: Yeah, I'm gonna blame Irish people for that one.

I hadn't seen that, Jane. They changed my categorization as well.

Before: IR/SC/WL 38%; Europe W 39%; Scand 14%

Now: IR/SC 54%; Eng & NW Eur 46%

This does not seem remotely accurate to me. JPJ, have you tried GEDMatch?

Ancestry's FAQ for their update includes, I kid you not, 'how do I remove that Viking tattoo' -- so I guess I'm not alone in losing Scandinavian as a category.

The migratons page from Ancestry missed (a) French migration to Canada and (b) Scots-Irish migration to Pennsylvania, each of which account for an 1/8th, and lots of DNA matches.

I'm not bothered by this stuff, because I never relied, or thought I could rely, on the categorizations from Ancestry.

Hmm, my updated as well. (I assumed there were small updates in the background all along.)

Also skeptical of the smaller %s, however, in my case the changes now better align with the known paper record.

Before: Europe W 46% Great Britain 29$ Ire/Scot 16%

Now Eng & NW Europe 78% Germanic Europe 10% (they say "refined" from Europe West), Ireland/Scotland 7%, Norway 5%

Specifically, I would expect ~12.5% Germanic (everyone else that we know of came through the British Isles). And one of the several identified Irish ancestors was an Anderson who apparently came form Scotland to Ulster Plantations. (And Anderson ultimately a Scandinavian name, but probably not quite ready to be sure they identified that with the Norwegian.)

My wife went 93% to 100% "European Jew."

Maybe they stopped subtracting for marrying a gentile?

Is Anderson a name people come by in the Danelaw?

The last ancestry.com results have me up to 1% human.

UK distribution of Anderson from this site gives most prominently Scotland's Borders and Lowlands. So not Danelaw, but still likely Norse origin.

It could be "Andersen" or "Andersson" with spelling changed when moving to an English speaking country.

Which makes sense, given that most Scots-Irish were originally Borderers or adjacent areas in the Lowlands. My Scots-Irish ancestors were probably from Ayrshire. Anyway, there was substantial Norse (mostly via Norway) influence on large chunks of Scotland throughout its history. The place of strongest overlap between the Borders and the Norse-influenced area is probably Galloway. That being said, many Anglo people moved to Lothian and the burghs elsewhere in the Middle Ages, so that could explain a Danelaw name in the North.

And trying out my Scots-Irish name in the link in 156, the spelling I use is almost uniquely in Antrim; a different spelling is only in Ayrshire and Edinburgh. On the other hand, the common English variant is all over the country but especially in Yorkshire and the Northeast. Fun tool.

157: It could be "Andersen" or "Andersson" with spelling changed when moving to an English speaking country.

Looking at Anderson/Andersen/Andersson from the site in `156 gives interestingly different patterns that I would not necessarily expected.

Anderson: Mainly lowland/borderland Scotland with some other distributions including N. Ireland (my particular ancestor came from Donegal in the 1770s).

Andersen: Concentrated in Newcastle (where there is also an "Anders" concentration).

Andersson: Concentrated in Bristol and part of S. England.

Occurred to me to look up Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull; he is from Fife.

Appropriately, as a fife is a kind of flute.

As for the pursuing genealogy in general what I enjoy the most (in addition to just putting together the puzzle even though some pieces may be irretrievable) some of the little "humanizing" snippets that peek out through the bureaucratic record. For instance the 3rd great-grandmother (and her daughter) who shaved several years per census of her age through several censuses. And the Revolutionary war veteran (the Anderson mentioned above)who was captured by Indians on the western frontier during the war and subsequently escaped from Montreal who subsequently married the daughter of a man who had similar escapade. (I imagine the two of them turning into terrific bores on the subject. "You ate a dog? We ate two dogs..."*)

*Eating dogs mentioned in both of their diaries/recountings.

I tried two spellings of my interesting ancestor's name in 156. One is almost 100% localized in Aberdeen, and the other one is all over the place. He has the non-Aberdeen spelling, but I think he was from Aberdeen. Maybe it was Americanized! Spelling really does change.

Yeah, there's a name line that goes nowhere before Pennsylvania on my mother's side, so I assume the name was shortened at Ellis Island to its fairly unique form. "Somewhere in the Germanic world, might start with these four letters*" doesn't really narrow it down. I don't know if there has ever been a way to track down those changes in public documents alone.

*The Xkcdobrowski were mostly from Lower Silesia

Probably the wildest name change I have heard of was a man of Croatian descent whose name was of "Bremenxxx" based on his grandfather having arrived on the Bremen and subsequent Ellis Island paperwork confusion.

I was a bit surprised that one of my lines "Folsom" returns "No Data" in the tool. I knew they had originally come to (Mass and NH) from the town of Foulsham in Norfolk but did not realize that variant of the name not used in England. (There are some Foulshams in that vicinity and another place in the south of England.)

Foulsham Prison Blues was the Johnny Cash cover album by Sean Connery.

My Andersons are from Fife. My male line ancestors come from Shalbourne, Wilts, a home of the original Jethro Tull.

JPJ, have you tried GEDMatch?

Well, I uploaded my data at the urging of a distant cousin, but I've never had the patience (or I guess the interest) to figure it out. And now I'll probably be falsely ID'd as a serial killer.

150: Fair enough. But I was thinking of the sorry state of the RC records: for many parishes (especially in the west and north), the registers don't begin until well into the nineteenth century (which does have to do with, amongst other things, British policies toward the RC Church in Ireland).

(Btw, I've encountered a number of people, both Irish and Irish-American, who mistakenly believe the lack of records for their ancestor's RC parish has to do with the horrible destruction [the loss of the 19th-century Irish census: sob!] of 1922. Of course this is wrong: the Catholic registers were not housed at the PRO, because they were not state records.)

Spelling really does change.

Yes, this. Also, in many (probably most?) parts of the western world, surname spellings were not standardized until well into the nineteenth century. Prior to, say, 1850 (or maybe even 1900?), "variant" surname spellings in both church and state records are more the norm than the exception.

Back when the church was the main impediment to marrying your cousin, having their records be confusing was a big help.

My name is centred on Antrim, I think, plus across the Scottish central belt, although I think much more common in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire than anywhere else. Especially if you use historic surname maps. The 1881 census, which is just mainland UK, it's all Ayrshire and Lanarkshire.*

Which would make sense if you think of the name as being east coast of Ulster and west coast of Lowland Scotland (which are only a few miles apart, albeit with a sea in the middle).

My great uncle moved to Canada in the early 20th century, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a connection to the hockey player.**

* although the tiny bit of digging suggests that the ancestors who came to Scotland in the 19th century were from Donegal and Mayo, I think.

** although also entirely possible none at all, since there were plenty of other people with the same surname emigrating at the same time.