Among the things 23andMe is suggesting is:
I can smell asparagus pee: True.
Likely detatched ear lobes: Well - I'm sort of in between.
Eye color likely blue or green: Yep (and recently corrected report)
Early hair loss: I guess, but compared to many of my relatives, I'm on the low end of this.
Unibrow unlikely: True, but ugly close...
Predisposed to be more corpulent: Yeah! It isn't my fault!
Likely lactose intolerant: Ya know - I might be to a degree? It would explain some things I won't go into here.
Likely to be a similar weight based on calories consumed regardless of saturated fat intake: Yeah for ice cream (see above) and bacon!
It should be noted that many of these things are more directional than strong predictions by 23andMe. As an example, I'm likely to have light hair, but of 23andMe participants like me, over 35% have dark brown or black hair. Some of the traits are predicted by only a few percentage points.
But by far the most interesting thing I've found is 23andMe's "DNA Relatives." After agreeing to share limited information, 23andMe comes up with a list of people who share enough DNA to be considered relatives - it found nearly 1200 matches just within people who have been tested by 23andMe. At first glance, this seems like a lot, but back of the envelope calculations suggest otherwise. Assuming 5 births per couple/generation:
50 first cousins
300 second cousins
1500 third cousins
7800 fourth cousins
40,000 fifth cousins
200,000 sixth cousins
etc. (Note, this is a slightly-simplified, inclusive model)
While 5 births may be high based on present day birth rates, I come from some obnoxiously large families and these numbers will be skewed higher by larger families further back in time - so these estimates are likely low. With a few known families that are into the double digits for children, the numbers may be very low.
Browsing through the list of DNA Relatives has been fascinating - I keep seeing a few key surnames and even a few that are consistent with the little I know about my family tree. Perhaps more telling, looking through the locations some people have shared reveals a who's where for what I know about past family.
23andMe allows the option to contact these people which I haven't done. At this point, pawing through the list of people is interesting, but it feels a little creepy at the same time. I would love to find out if the actual relations could be teased out for some of the closer matches, but I'm really not sure what I would do with that information, or even what I'd do if someone contacted me for that.
But I definitely want to do some more browsing here to see if I can find matches between surnames and location that clearly look non-coincidental.
After going through much of the data provided by 23andMe I sent my siblings an email telling them about my boring genetic make-up. I was kind of hoping one of them might be interested in this as well (or had already been tested out of curiosity like me), but there were no bites. I can't blame them - it took me a long time to do this.
But it did start a conversation on what is known about our ancestry. Apparently a fairly comprehensive family tree was created at one time for my mom's side. And I found out that there was a book written about some the history of my dad's family.
Whhhhaaaaat?
How come I didn't know about this book? Actually, I may have at one point, but it slipped through the memory cracks.
Proving that absolutely everything is available on Amazon, a quick search showed this book was available used through a seller with good ratings - a signed copy no less. Add to Cart!
The book is written by my great uncle about my great grandfather and great grandmother's immigration to the United States through their deaths. It isn't a page-turning thriller, but it is far more interesting than I expected. Some of it is hard to follow since many of the European names are similar and with very large families, there are a lot of them. But the book details the immigration, life's challenges and victories, belief structures and daily life of the immigrant family.
In a way, the book is a document of European post-industrial immigration. The struggle between maintaining old world language, customs and religion in the melting pot experiment that was, and is, North America. It is the story of coming to America with almost nothing, and building a far more successful life than would have been likely in Western Europe.
My great grandfather was essentially an orphan with little prospects - his marriage to a woman from a prominent family was a bit of a scandal - their combined future would have been that of his - a common laborer likely to live a life of poverty. Moving to North America was a risk that resulted in a difficult life that, combined with hard work, resulted in a life far more successful that would have been possible for either of them.
If I add what I know about the immigration of my mom's side of the family shortly after WWII, I realize how close in time I really am to Europe, even though I'm about as "American" as it gets. I would love to find a way to do a similar documentation of that story, but it would be all-encompassing for a year or more to do it right.
Some of the pictures in my Great Uncle's book are also fascinating. Seeing my grandfather as a young child and young man. Seeing where my dad's family lived. Seeing pictures of early family reunions (138 people, which was not inclusive of everyone).
Before he died, my dad had given me a painting, done by a cousin, of my dad's grandfather's barn. It was painted on wood that was taken from that barn during a repair (or possibly when it was torn down). That barn features in the book, and a picture shows how close the painting is. That painting which has hung in the garage for a few years, feels a little more like a relic now; at the time I got it, I didn't realize the significance.
Several times I had to pause while reading the book and think that these aren't anonymous people I'm reading about in a history book, but people I'm related to. More than that, just a minor tweak to events could have resulted in me being very different from what I am - or even me not existing at all. I am statistically very unlikely.
I'm really not sure where I go from here. Part of me would love to run with the information I have and see what else can fall out of the family tree. But a more rational part of me knows that ancestral research can be an all-consuming obsession - taking time, money and energy resources that I'm not sure I want to (or can) devote to that.
What I can say for sure, is that decision to spit in a tube and send it to 23andMe pointed to toward an extremely fascinating fractal.
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