Woman uses DNA to find birth family after 75 years

This is a very long, but very moving, story on BBC today. It's absolutely extraordinary how through doing a dna test and people helping her by doing dna tests and going on a global database she went from knowing nothing about her family to knowing loads about them:


Why was I left on a hillside to die?

In the summer of 1937 a nine-month-old girl was hidden, with her hands tied, in a blackberry bush in southern England. She was found by sheer chance by a family of holidaymakers. Now 80, Anthea Ring has spent most of her life wondering why she was left to die and who her parents were. Thanks to a leap forward in genetic genealogy she finally has some answers.... There were no further breakthroughs until 2012, when Anthea, then 75, decided to take a DNA test.

This revealed her ethnicity was 92% Irish and matched her with some distant cousins in America and Ireland.

One cousin called Joan, living in North Carolina, asked relatives in her extended family tree to take tests. This revealed Joan was linked to Anthea through her father's maternal side. They came from County Mayo in Ireland.

"I met Joan in 2013. She was the first blood relative I had ever met so it was quite something," Anthea says.

Two years later she matched with a woman who worked at Dublin University, called Ann. Ann didn't match with Joan, which suggested she was from the other side of Anthea's family. Ann's family came from County Galway.

By this time Anthea had joined online communities for adoptees and foundlings and in April 2016 she was contacted by genetic genealogist Julia Bell, who offered to help...

metaoblivia

Tha's a great story! I went on a similar search for my father, who was adopted in 1947. Last year, we were able to confirm his birth mother and birth father through DNA, and I got to meet his half sister (and my half aunt) on a trip to Dublin in the summer. He had grown up an only child but now has 8 half siblings.
His mother's name was on his unsealed birth certificate, but for his father, I had only DNA to go on. I had a huge spreadsheet of all of his cousins and how they interlinked, and was able to use that, along with residency records, to pinpoint the man whom I thought was likely his bio father. Then I was able to contact that man's children and grandchildren and DNA testing proved the rest.
My only regret is that both of his bio parents had died by the time we did all of us. And this sort of testing wasn't really available 10 years ago. So that makes me a little sad, but they may not have wanted to hear from him either. It's always a gamble how people are going to feel.

Has anybody done any of these DNA ancestry test? I'm seriously thinking of doing one now, even though I don't expect any surprises (as I mentioned elsewhere, when the Land Commission was dividing up a huge local estate in the 1930s my grandfather was on the top of the list of recipients because, as he was told at the time, a man with his same first and second name was the recorded property owner in 1641, and my family have lived in the area for as long as can be remembered. I checked, and sure enough the Books of Survey and Distribution record, which records all landowners in Ireland in 1641, is true to this family account from the 1930s) but it would be surprising if there weren't a surprise if it can trace back centuries.


If you have taken one of these tests, what test did you use and how did you find its accuracy? The Ancestry.com one comes in top of the review below:

Best DNA testing kits of 2018

However, this very informative article makes me a bit uncertain as to the reliability of these tests, and how useful they'd be for the average Irish person - the success of the lady in the op notwithstanding:

How DNA botched my family's heritage, and probably yours, too

I suspected the error might lay not in my family narrative, but in the DNA test itself. So I decided to conduct an experiment. I mailed my own spit samples to AncestryDNA, as well as to 23andMe and National Geographic. For each test I got back, the story of my genetic heritage was different—in some cases, wildly so.... Four tests, four very different answers about where my DNA comes from—including some results that contradicted family history I felt confident was fact. What gives?

There are a few different factors at play here.

Genetics is inherently a comparative science: Data about your genes is determined by comparing them to the genes of other people.

As Adam Rutherford, a British geneticist and author of the excellent book “A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived,” explained to me, we’ve got a fundamental misunderstanding of what an ancestry DNA test even does.

“They’re not telling you where your DNA comes from in the past,” he told me, “They’re telling you where on Earth your DNA is from today.”

Ancestry, for example, had determined that my Aunt Cat was 30 percent Italian by comparing her genes to other people in its database of more than six million people, and finding presumably that her genes had a lot of things in common with the present-day people of Italy.

“They’re not telling you where your DNA comes from in the past. They’re telling you where on Earth your DNA is from today.”
Heritage DNA tests are more accurate for some groups of people than others, depending how many people with similar DNA to yours have already taken their test. Ancestry and 23andMe have actually both published papers about how their statistical modeling works.

As Ancestry puts it: “When considering AncestryDNA estimates of genetic ethnicity it is important to remember that our estimates are, in fact, estimates. The estimates are variable and depend on the method applied, the reference panel used, and the other customer samples included during estimation.”

That the data sets are primarily made up of paying customers also skews demographics. If there’s only a small number of Middle Eastern DNA samples that your DNA has been matched against, it’s less likely you’ll get a strong Middle Eastern match.

“Different companies have different reference data sets and different algorithms, hence the variance in results,” a spokesman from 23andMe told me. “Middle Eastern reference populations are not as well represented as European, an industry-wide challenge.”

As a person of Syrian descent, the British genealogist Debbie Kennett told me, my test was simply not going to be as accurate as fellow Americans whose relatives skew more European. “The tests are mainly geared for an American audience, and they tend to not have a lot of Middle Eastern ancestry,” she said.

Likewise, Kennett said, because relatively few English people have taken tests from American companies like Ancestry or 23andMe, residents of the U.K. are likely to find less useful results.

“A lot of English people come up with a low percentage of British. My dad was only 8 percent British and most of his ancestors as far back as I can trace came back from Great Britain,” she told me. “People in America come up with much higher percentage of British, often.”...

OK. Notwithstanding the legitimate data concerns in this informative Boards discussion, I read John Grenham's blog on doing the same Ancestry.com DNA test and said I'd give it a go. The earlier linked concerns in the above post about the reliability, limitations and narrow database upon which definitions like "Irish" are made in these DNA tests - this article - was especially informative. In short, unlike the lady in the op who got a whole lot from her DNA test, I'm not expecting too much but I'm curious nonetheless.

I saw it for sale for £79 on ancestry.co.uk but as soon as they spot your ip is from Ireland they redirect you to the same product for €95 (£79 in € is €90 according to a quick google). Anyway, ancestry.co.uk then want to charge €20 for delivery to Ireland on top of that. No thanks.

Went over to Amazon.co.uk and paid €105 (£89) for the Ancestry.com DNA test, with free delivery (or, rather, free delivery to a Parcel Motel location in Antrim). It takes 6-8 weeks before they send the results back.

Ipso

It depends what you want to know. I think any ancestry beyond six generations will get washed out, you have two grand parents, four great grand parents, eight gg parents, 16 ggg parents etc so once you get to a certain number of generations the chances of having any genetic tracer form them is very slim.
Also I think once you get to 20 generations, in theory you should have one million ancestors in your family tree and that will double at each subsequent generation. From what I've read, once you go beyond ten generations the exponential growth starts to diminish due to pedigree collapse (nice word for inbreeding).

The ancestry composition thing can be confusing, a lot of it depends on what kind of database the company has. For example at 23andme they find it hard to distinguish between English and German/Scandinavian. Irish, Scottish people and Welsh people are very close genetically and if any population isn't represented will in the database then they will fit you with the closest example. Plus all European populations are really descended from three ancient source populations (post Ice Age, Mid East farmers and Kurgan/Yamanya/Bell beakers/Indo Europeans) the differences in each is really just fine tuning.
And as the article you quoted mentions it really tells you more about recent populations, not ancient ones (although with the increase in ancient genomes being tested this may improve in future).

Another issue is that Irish people tend to have horrible paper trails, I am unable to confirm fairly close relations at 23andme because of this.
Plus you get some fun things like finding out you have higher than average Neanderthal DNA, but then again I am from Donegal.

metaoblivia

I've taken Ancestry DNA and 23 and Me tests I take the ethnicity estimates with a grain of salt, because, as the article you posted above states, they are estimates and each company has a slightly different mapping system.

As stated above, the tests were very helpful for my family because we were using them to look for biological family. We're American, and the tests are quite popular in the US. My mother, whose family goes back to the early 1600s in the US, has over 1,000 4th cousins or closer. My father, whose family immigrated to the US much more recently (late 1800s), only has around 250 4th cousins or closer, mostly American and a few in Ireland and Portugal. There's a big difference between the amount of cousin matches they have because my mother's side is much more American, and Americans use these tests much more than Europeans do.

I find Ancestry better than 23 and Me. I think the layout is much more user friendly. There are other sites too, like MyHeritage and FamilyTree DNA, which still does the X and Y chromosome testing (all of the other sites are autosomal testing only now). And then you can upload your raw data to GedMatch and they have some interesting tools to play with.

Deleted User

Deleted User wrote: »

OK. Notwithstanding the legitimate data concerns in this informative Boards discussion, I read John Grenham's blog on doing the same Ancestry.com DNA test and said I'd give it a go. The earlier linked concerns in the above post about the reliability, limitations and narrow database upon which definitions like "Irish" are made in these DNA tests - this article - was especially informative. In short, unlike the lady in the op who got a whole lot from her DNA test, I'm not expecting too much but I'm curious nonetheless.

I saw it for sale for £79 on ancestry.co.uk but as soon as they spot your ip is from Ireland they redirect you to the same product for €95 (£79 in € is €90 according to a quick google). Anyway, ancestry.co.uk then want to charge €20 for delivery to Ireland on top of that. No thanks.

Went over to Amazon.co.uk and paid €105 (£89) for the Ancestry.com DNA test, with free delivery (or, rather, free delivery to a Parcel Motel location in Antrim). It takes 6-8 weeks before they send the results back.

Got my Ancestry.com results back just now. Some interesting stuff. Aside from the 'Ireland/Scotland/Wales' category which is 95% of my DNA apparently, I'm Russian. Or rather more Finnish/Russian than the others:
'Low Confidence Regions:
Finland/Northwest Russia 1%
Great Britain <1%
Europe South <1%
European Jewish <1%
Polynesia <1%

Now, that's an interesting list!

A fairly fascinating list of names also coming up with degree of links. "198 4th cousins or closer". At the top is a first cousin, but 4 people in the "1st-2nd cousin" category I've never heard of (I've a massive family on both sides, though, so I'm making inquiries at the moment).

Captainaxiom

Deleted User wrote: »

OK. Notwithstanding the legitimate data concerns in this informative Boards discussion, I read John Grenham's blog on doing the same Ancestry.com DNA test and said I'd give it a go. The earlier linked concerns in the above post about the reliability, limitations and narrow database upon which definitions like "Irish" are made in these DNA tests - this article - was especially informative. In short, unlike the lady in the op who got a whole lot from her DNA test, I'm not expecting too much but I'm curious nonetheless.

I saw it for sale for £79 on ancestry.co.uk but as soon as they spot your ip is from Ireland they redirect you to the same product for €95 (£79 in € is €90 according to a quick google). Anyway, ancestry.co.uk then want to charge €20 for delivery to Ireland on top of that. No thanks.

Went over to Amazon.co.uk and paid €105 (£89) for the Ancestry.com DNA test, with free delivery (or, rather, free delivery to a Parcel Motel location in Antrim). It takes 6-8 weeks before they send the results back.

Can you not just use your parcel motel or addresspal address on their site and have it posted here ??

Another very moving DNA-related story by Laura Hogan on RTÉ News at 9pm tonight. An 81-year-old woman, Eileen Macken, who had survived the notorious Bethany Homes, went on Liveline on 22 March 2017 and spoke for 18 minutes about her lifelong search for her mother.

... but DNA testing connected her with a cousin and the work of a genealogist who heard her story on RTÉ's Liveline completed the puzzle...'Your mother is still alive and she's 103 years of age!'

Tonight's 9pm news is not up on the RTÉ website yet but when it is, it's worth a look.