Geno 2.0

[Groundhog]

Anyone planning on signing up for this? I only just discovered it today after reading once again about the 'Genghis Khan Effect' and wondered what sort of DNA testing is available to a regular joe. The kit ships 30th Oct, and a link if anyone is interested:

About the Genographic Project - National Geographic | Genographic Project

[Pumpy Tudors]

I would do it for up to $50 or so, but $200 is a little out of my price range for something like this. Neat idea, though.

[Autumn]

I know my dad got some sort of free/really cheap genetic testing for being a member of Ancestry.com. It turned out very interesting, as the side of our family that is from Germany apparently didn't really originate there, as we had no German DNA, but a lot of southern European instead.

I don't have many to spend on any of these tests but I think they're definitely worthwhile if you do.

[lungs]

I did 1.0, which was fairly interesting. Pretty much had me spot on as being a descendant of the Vikings. I might do this one too. It's interesting for me as my great-great grandfather on my paternal side is a dead end in terms of information as he was an orphan.

[Groundhog]

Originally Posted by lungs

I did 1.0, which was fairly interesting. Pretty much had me spot on as being a descendant of the Vikings. I might do this one too. It's interesting for me as my great-great grandfather on my paternal side is a dead end in terms of information as he was an orphan.

I spent a bit of time looking into my family a few years ago, and had two dead ends, my mother's side in France in the mid-1800s where it seems we came from Norway before that but can't be certain, and my father's side we came from a Scottish convict who was sent to this God-forsaken continent for stealing tea of all things in 1787, but have been unable to find anything for that ancestor prior to his court appearance.

[lungs]

The more I read the more 2.0 intrigues me. 1.0 was neat and all, but it only did my paternal path. I've got some theories on my dad's maternal side, which can be traced back to 1500s Switzerland. I may go for this. I know my dad really likes stuff like that too. I'd be interested to know my mother's side too, all I know is she is 100% Bavarian German.

[BrianD]

Do you guys have any good recommendations for tracing the family history...other than paying ancestry.com to do it? I'd like to try this on my own, but could use a jump-start.

[Wolfpack]

Originally Posted by BrianD

Do you guys have any good recommendations for tracing the family history...other than paying ancestry.com to do it? I'd like to try this on my own, but could use a jump-start.

Generally speaking, FamilySearch (the LDS website) is probably a good first stop as they have a lot of stuff that's searchable and it's all free. Another trick is to check and see if your local library system has a deal with Ancestry for their "Library Edition" website. That will give you large portions of what Ancestry offers for free, as well. It's also entirely possible the library system may have other genealogy resources available for free as well (at the very least, local newspaper archives or things of that nature).

Probably the biggest source of information for beginners in the US is the census schedules between 1850 and 1940 (excluding 1890, which was mostly destroyed in a fire) since they'll have full family listings (prior to 1850, it was just head-of-household and a count of who lived there). If you know where your grandparents or great-grandparents lived, they should show up in those census reports. From there, you can start poking around at the more specialized databases that genealogy websites have like marriage indexes or death certificate listings (most of which are transcribed, though some do have scans of microfilmed images, as well). This will help to back up or disprove or even introduce new information and perhaps extend family trees further back in time or add new members depending on what's in the database.

[sabotai]

Generally, the census is a good place to start. Well, #1 would be to get as much info from your relatives as possible. After that, then the census to fill in the details and go back further.

I was thinking of grabbing Ancestry's latest DNA offering. I'm quite the mixed breed and have quite a few lines that end before I can trace them back to the Old World, so I don't know what 50% of me is. The other ~50% is mostly English and Scottish, with some Swedish, German (Baden-Wurttemberg) and French.

[Groundhog]

I was surprised to find on ancestry.com that someone else, a fairly-distant relative who doesn't appear on my tree, had actually mapped out our family tree down to my mother's generation, with a lot of extra information too.

[Edward64]

A little bit concerned about how privacy & confidentiality will be handled but am okay with tracking down the guilty (and possibly freeing innocents).

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/...ealogy/560750/

Just three weeks ago, law enforcement in California announced the arrest of the Golden State Killer using DNA. The press conference was vague, but the details of the novel method soon trickled out: Joseph James DeAngelo was found by matching DNA from a crime scene with that of his distant relative on the genealogy site GEDmatch.

On Friday, police in Washington State announced the arrest of William Earl Talbott II for a double murder in 1987, and this time, they proudly announced the use of the same method of tracing distant relatives through DNA—a field known as genetic genealogy. Steven Armentrout, the president of Parabon NanoLabs, the forensics company that did the DNA analysis, spoke at the press conference. So did CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist who now works with the company.

Parabon has jumped headlong into this technology. On May 8, it announced the creation of a new genetic-genealogy unit led by Moore. The company recently told BuzzFeed it had uploaded DNA from about 100 crime scenes to GEDmatch.com, with about 20 of them generating matches of a third cousin or closer. “I think there is going to be press around this very soon,” the company’s director of bioinformatics had said to BuzzFeed.

[Groundhog]

Yeah I read that. I have no issues with it being used for things like this, although maybe I just read too much sci fi growing up because I can see genetic information like this being misused to profile people one dark day in our future.

[PilotMan]

Originally Posted by Groundhog

Yeah I read that. I have no issues with it being used for things like this, although maybe I just read too much sci fi growing up because I can see genetic information like this being misused to profile people one dark day in our future.

In a lot of ways the sci fi of decades ago is the truth of today. There's truth to the dreams of our futures, and that's as terrifying as anything.

[stevew]

I'm just happy that the Golden State Killer is spending the rest of his miserable life in prison.

[stevew]

Did the zodiac killer leave any DNA?