I was able to bust a long-standing family myth of Native American ancestry by doing some basic research……“But Great Aunt So-and-So had such lovely long thick black hair, she looked just like a squaw,” said my 90-year-old aunt. Nope, sorry, ain’t true. Liz “High Cheekbones” Warren sympathizes, I’m sure.

My paternal grandmother had high cheekbones, but her extensively researched family history turned up no American Indian history in her family. (OTOH, she did find out my grandfather did have such an ancestor, which would make me 1/512 .)

One of my cousins inherited our grandmother’s high cheekbones. One summer she worked at Crater Lake National Park. One of the park visitors asked her if she had any American Indian ancestry. My cousin replied that she was the great-granddaughter of Cochise. Give the customers what they want, whether it is true or not. She still chuckles about that.

A friend of mine, very clearly Irish, was surprised to find a significant sign of Spanish ancestry in her DNA, and wondered how in the world that could have happened.
I told her of several historical avenues, not least the marooning of Spanish Armada sailors in Eire, but people have a mistaken idea that no one before the Wright Brothers ever did any foreign traveling.

https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/spanish-armada-ireland-black-irish

Something of a rebuttal of my first claim, but supports my second one.
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/black-irish-spanish-armada

a good lesson in the hazards of basing history on family traditions handed down the generations.

I was able to bust a long-standing family myth of Native American ancestry by doing some basic research. Turns out there were two William Lovelys with different middle initials running around Tennessee/Arkansas in the 1820s; we’re descended from the one who wasn’t the U.S. Indian Agent (who didn’t marry into the Cherokee tribe anyway, but why stop at one historical distortion?).

“But Great Aunt So-and-So had such lovely long thick black hair, she looked just like a squaw,” said my 90-year-old aunt. Nope, sorry, ain’t true. Liz “High Cheekbones” Warren sympathizes, I’m sure.

He is said to have had an illegitimate son in WWI, but it is disputed.

How fit and proper that an offshoot of Old Stock was grafted onto Old Stock and thrived and was fruitful. This probably did not happen by accident given that in the good old days adoptions were handled by religious organizations who had a lot of common sense lacking today ingrained in their organizational DNAs.

Truly a beautiful story and a Good Outcome.

Both of these sites allow the user to download their raw data; it’s just a big text file. Can then upload it to Promethease.com

Promethease runs your data by a ton of genome-wide associative studies (GWAS) and gives you a ranked list of your probable traits and ways you might go right and wrong. It has powerful tools for re-ranking, filtering, sorting, etc.

I don’t think that it’s something that should be let loose on the general public and it’s not designed to be. Best left to those of a more philosophical and phlegmatic bent and who are also have some understanding of statistics/probability/risk. Think of it as a tentative map and not the territory. Don’t go jumping off a bridge just because you read something in the results :).

The real gold in this is that GWAS are in their infancy, but rapidly finding new associations and also improving in explanatory power as the input samples grow… i.e. as more people get tested with tests matched against traits and medical histories. In other words, 10 years from now, the data from your test (your genome isn’t going to change much apart from normal mutations with age) will likely tell you more about you and more accurately than it does today.