DNA Why I urge caution

[TravellingGirl94]

Without DNA I would never have known that my dad was not my real father. Something I never suspected for a moment. My real grandmother's birth certificate does not have the correct names on it, and my probable great grandparents did not marry until 7 years after my grandmother was born. I can find no birth record/baptism for my great grandfather and no marriage for his possible parents. I do not trust anything that I cannot find DNA proof for.

[Mart 'n' Al]

Reply #61, You have the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, a bill signed into United States law in 2008 designed to prohibit the improper use of genetic information in health insurance and employment.

Martin

[Finley 1]

Without DNA I would never have known that my dad was not my real father. Something I never suspected for a moment. My real grandmother's birth certificate does not have the correct names on it, and my probable great grandparents did not marry until 7 years after my grandmother was born. I can find no birth record/baptism for my great grandfather and no marriage for his possible parents. I do not trust anything that I cannot find DNA proof for.

SO  are you glad you now know  !?  or where you better off in ignorance..!!

what do you think


xin

[TravellingGirl94]

Without DNA I would never have known that my dad was not my real father. Something I never suspected for a moment. My real grandmother's birth certificate does not have the correct names on it, and my probable great grandparents did not marry until 7 years after my grandmother was born. I can find no birth record/baptism for my great grandfather and no marriage for his possible parents. I do not trust anything that I cannot find DNA proof for.

SO  are you glad you now know  !?  or where you better off in ignorance..!!

what do you think


xin

Although it has been an overwhelming shock and I cry almost every day for my lost father, I am very glad I know the truth. It explains so much about my unhappy childhood. My mother was always the problem though, my dad (stepdad) did his best to be a good father too me and we loved each other. But he was always a very angry man. I am so much like my lost father in looks and personality. I always did wonder why none of the family appeared to resemble each other.

[Mart 'n' Al]

TG94, remember that he was an angry man by his nature, not that he was angry at you.

Martin

[TravellingGirl94]

TG94, remember that he was an angry man by his nature, not that he was angry at you.

Martin

I believe that it was my mother's behaviour that caused his anger. With what I know now, I am not at all surprised that he had a lot of anger.

[Finley 1]

Well that is something to have on your shoulders -- xxxxxxx

Its funny isnt it how somedays we look around and see what we consider to be people that are living a 'normal' life  and they look reasonably well dressed, fed and educated.. and almost happy...
NONE of us know do we ... what it really is like in their world..

the sweet innocent looking people that are creating mayhem behind closed doors.. as is in the news this week.. and the ANGRY hard looking people that are actually facing all kinds of 'hell'  when entering the front door.


My sister and I we knew what it was like to worry  --- only worry about going through the front door,   We had a parent that would now be classed as Bi-polar and oh my .. one day you would enter paradise and the next hell..


anyway .. off that subject and hope against hope that you can be strong and cope with the .... stuff that you are discovering and live with good memories of someone that really did their best for u xxxx

xin

[TonyV]

In his original post Guy Etchells suggested that there may come a day when DNA testing, after much scientific progress, would be really useful to us all and inevitably many posts then followed with stories of knocking down brick walls as the result of a DNA test.

I was probably a very early adopter of the possibilities of knocking down my main paternal brick wall and I took what was then the standard DNA Y chromosome test way back in 2004. My test was actually paid for by the DNA research project into my surname and its derivations hosted by the DNA company. It was by today's standards a fairly limited test and all it succeeded in showing was that I was unrelated within any reasonable timescale to anyone else with the same surname in that project. The project has grown since then and now numbers several hundred people but I am still unrelated to any of them (sadly the original sponsor died many years ago too).

That was a huge disappointment, partly because it failed to knock a single brick out of my wall (which remains standing today 15 years later) but it also meant that I was unable to grab hold of the coat tails of the person who started the project and who had progressed impressively far back along his ancestors. Would that they had been mine too!

The company I used was Family Tree DNA based in the USA and of course their database is dominated by Americans but as far as I know, none of my ancestors ever emigrated to the USA so it is perhaps unsurprising that their database, even today, doesn't include anyone who shares my DNA with the same surname. After several years when I got no 'matches' I corresponded with the company and all of a sudden I started to get 'matches' again and I still get one or two a month, but still no-one who shares my surname. Most such 'matches' seem originally to have come from Ireland, or still live there, but my ancestors are solidly East Midlands, England going back to the mid 1700s. That's where my brick wall stands.

So in summary, DNA testing has been a complete waste of time for me, but I remain open to possibility that at some stage Guy will tell me that the science has now progressed sufficiently for me to have another go. I should be so lucky to still be around by then of course

Tony 

[Lubana]

Several different companies and sites have given me varying percentages of certain ethnicities but that's normal.  The per cent can only be what we in America call "a ballpark figure"--no such thing as absolute accuracy there.  It depends on the criteria the testing companies use.  If you get a small amount of a certain ethnicity on one site or with one company and another fails to assign it to you--that is normal, too.  Somebody just didn't detect that small amount.  The weird thing is that I have actually lost [and gained] ethnicities with a small percent--1% or less with 23andMe.

Regardless, all my sites now seem to agree [pretty much] on my ethnities but the percentages they assign me do vary.  Nothing to worry about.