In my ongoing effort to distract from the terror and despair due to the election outcome, tonight I provide an update on a couple of TC diaries I posted (here and here) previously regarding my ancestry. The results from my DNA test came back with at least one puzzling result. More below the fold
I’m not completely unplugged from the crisis, however; I have an ACLU board meeting this weekend. I am hoping that the organization is mobilizing.
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My first diary on this topic reviewed my sister’s DNA results, which were surprising because of an unexpectedly large component of British heritage, and a lack of expected western European heritage. Given that none of our known forebears were from Britain, we would not have expected anything significant from there; for my sister, her British DNA was her largest component. On the other hand, one of our grandfathers was of German extraction, while the other was French, which ought to have resulted in a large western European component; my sister’s was 9 %, and mine is even smaller. This was particularly confusing until (as revealed in my second diary on the topic) we learned from our aunt that our French grandfather was, in fact, not our biological grandfather, so that we likely have no French heritage at all. (My mother was born out of wedlock, and we don’t know who our maternal grandfather was. She never told us this. She passed away 9 years ago.)
My own DNA analysis showed the largest components to be 30 % Eastern Europe, 30 % Italy/Greece,, and 23 % Great Britain. (Our grandmothers were Bohemian and Italian, so the top two components are consistent with our known heritage.) I have a larger component of eastern Europe, but a smaller contribution from Great Britain, than my sister. My Scandinavian component (8 %) is a few percent higher than hers, but my western European component is way down (4 %). It’s funny looking at the origins map, because I have a German last name, while the map showing most significant contributions skips Germany entirely! Is there another ancestral surprise in the offing? Perhaps my grandfather’s “German” forebears came from the east also, adding to the eastern European component—but we still don’t know how Great Britain fits into this puzzle at all.
Among the minor components, I lack the eastern European Jewish genes that my sister has, but I have an Iberian gene that she doesn’t have. So there. Everything else is pretty consistent.
The Ancestry website allows you to construct a family tree, and doing so has provided a certain amount of distraction. Not only have I been building my own family tree, I’ve been working on hubby’s, too. Ancestry research turns out to be much easier to do if you’re a WASP (like hubby). If you don’t pay Ancestry for resource access, the free info they provide is, for the most part, limited to US records (birth, death, census and marriage records). I run into a wall in my family in the mid-19th Century, because that’s when my earliest ancestors arrived on these shores. For Hubby’s family, on the other hand, I managed to go back all the way to the 18th Century in one case.
On the other hand, just having the correct spelling of my Italian great grandmother’s maiden name, provided by my aunt, and just putting her correct full name into Google brought forth a link that provided the names and birth dates of the parents of my Italian great grandfather, to my great surprise. This information was entirely new to me. For fun, I also confirmed family lore that we are related (by marriage) to David Hasselhoff.
All this ancestry stuff is going to make my visit to my sister much easier than it would be otherwise, as it will make politics that much easier to avoid over Thanksgiving.
Enough about me. On to the comments!
Top Comments (November 17, 2016):
From Avilyn:
koosah has an excellent comment on the price of cooperating with Republicans, even on seemingly innocuous things like an infrastructure bill.
Source: Chitown Kev’s post Rant: please don’t do this.
From BeninSC:
Last night foresterbob submitted a series of comments from Got a Grip. When I checked out the comments during the formatting, I posted a comment to the effect that foresterbob had submitted the comments to Top Comments. Got a Grip read that, and wrote this fine comment reply!
From your humble diarist:
A Siegel points out that if Trump had not been elected president, there’s little doubt he would have been denied a security clearance. NHlib replies with a pertinent question.
Source: Christian Dem in NC’s recommended post about Steve Bannon’s possible ineligibility for security clearance.
Top Mojo (November 16, 2016):
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Top Pictures (November 16, 2016):