geno 2.0

Well, I finally received my Geno 2.0 results and they did surprise me. I think everyone who does this kind of DNA testing wants to be surprised like, "I'm half Japanese? No way!"

Going into this, I was expecting to be half Northern European, half Southern European or Mediterranean. I've looked into my family tree over many generations, and my grandfathers' families were in Italy for many hundreds of years, and my grandmothers' families came from, with a few exceptions, the British Isles - Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales.

First, the Y (paternal) and mtDNA (maternal) lines. Mypaternal line is a pretty common Western European one, R P-310. This is found in northern Italy, Spain, France, and the British Isles -- the Western edge of Europe. That is because we all descend from the first Europeans, who some are today best represented by the Basque people. In fact, it is thought that the Basque's language is this original ancient European language.

My mtDNA (maternal line) was H2A1. This is found in abundance in Scandinavia and Russia, trending toward the east of Europe, but H2 is actually in highest concentration in Scotland. My grandmother's family traces to Ireland, so ... not so far away. This would mean that our female ancestor probably came from the east via Scandinavia and into Scotland and then later into Ireland. This could have happened thousands of years ago.

My genetic composition was a bit surprising: 46 percent Mediterranean, 31 percent Northern European, 21 percent Southwest Asian. Mediterraneans are defined as you would expect - Spanish, Sardinians, Tunisians, Greeks, Lebanese. Northern European was defined as being found in highest abundance in UK, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia. Southwest Asian was very interesting -- Iran, Tajikistan, northern India. So about a fifth of my ancestry is from that region. Surprise! My reference population was Bulgarian -- apparently, Bulgarians and I are made of approximately the same mix of populations.

So, what I learned was that my Italian ancestry must have had a strong eastern component, and that my British Isles ancestry must have had a strong Mediterranean component -- as Britain and Ireland were populated from Iberia (Spain and Portugal) long ago, this would be plausible.

One issue I have been constantly trying to address with my research has been rumors of Native American ancestry. Geno 2.0 can detect Native ancestry down to 2 percent of your total ancestry, but that means if your Native ancestry dated back to before the mid-18th century, it wouldn't show. However, I have been able to download my raw data file and run it through a variety of admixture calculators available online. Each calculation has shown statistically significant amounts of Native American ancestry, ranging from 1 to 5 percent of the total. That would make sense, because any admixture with Native Americans would have occurred in my grandmother's family in the 17th or early 18th centuries, a time when the native Algonquian and Iroquoian tribes of eastern Virginia and North Carolina were shattered by war and disease, and Native men and women melted into the European and African communities.

In the end, I will have to ask -- is this worth it? I think it is, because I have spent years and many dollars doing family research, and for less than $200, I was able to obtain information I wouldn't have been able to get anywhere else. Actually, I feel like this caps this kind of research for me. With certain questions - like the one about Native ancestry - put to rest, I can focus on other things, as my curiosity has at last been sated.