DNA tracing back to the Old Country?

[thewayne]

National Geographic has launched something called the Genographic Project where you pay $100 for a testing kit, take a couple of swabs inside your cheek, and they will type it and tell you where your genetic ancestors came from.

It's an interesting story. A Catholic priest in New Mexico found out he's from African Jews, a black man who thought he was African turned out to be more Irish than anything else, etc. I'm tempted to do it, sounds kind of cool.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11080815/site/newsweek/

Comments

[deborak]

That's something I've always wanted to do, but the cost has been a bit frivolous. May go ahead and do it later this year. :-)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I was curious what you thought of it. We had a geneological tree dead-end on a woman whom everyone "knew" was an American Indina, but no one knew her tribe or tribal name. This would be one way to potentially discover it.

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

Like Deb, it's something I heard about awhile back but didn't want to pony up the bucks for. My understanding is that I'm a European mutt (pick a country in Western Europe/UK and I probably had at least one ancestor from there) but this would be very interesting to actually find out.

[deborak]

The mtDNA test for me would be amusing because of the fact that my father's and mother's lines intermarried, then separated, the intermarried again. As a result, my family tree is shaped more like a diamond and I am not only my parent's child, but also cousin to each of them on either side. (You can start humming the I'm my own grandpa song now!)

I'd love to see how the test would interpret all that.

[joecthulhu.livejournal.com]

My family tree is small and sparce; kinda like Charlie Brown's X-Mas tree.

I've got branches of the family that have been in this country quite a while, include one who was a young boy who was found hiding in the woods after a massacre during the French-Indian War. Even so I'd be surprized if I had more than 1/16 of anything other than Germanic.