Thursday, March 28, 2013

Find your ethnic ancestry

Or my preferred title: Admix Utilities are so Interesting!

It is no longer terribly expensive to get your autosomal DNA tested. Using it to find your cousin matches and thus, at least you hope, your distant ancestor (who has been hiding behind a brick wall) is still a big challenge. Sometimes the clues will get you closer, but often they won't, at least so far. There just isn't enough information. But there will be. Eventually there will be a much larger database and the connections will be easy to make.

But what is easy, and rewarding right now is the admix!
While the testing company might not provide much in the way of ethnic ancestry, once you download your raw data (simple and quick) and load it up to gedmatch.com (a free website) and enter it into the multitude of admix utilities you will see beautiful pie charts or bar charts with your ancestry broken down into ethnic components. It is really a kick to see, and there are more options all the time.

The most recent Eurogenes breakdown (Eurogenes K36) includes such classifications as Iberian, Basque, Arabian, Eastern European, Italian, Armenian, and more (ultimately 36 reference populations).

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