Have your ever done a DNA test? What were your results?

I think it’s a misunderstanding of the motivations of a lot of Americans to say that it’s a race driven thing.

While many of us in Europe, Asia, Africa or any of the “old world” usually have a fairly clear sense of who our ancestors likely were, even if we don’t have the exact names and details, many Americans really don’t.

There are records but there are also large numbers of people for whom documents didn’t exist or were very vague.

Many people moved there in search of a new life often not all that keen to preserve links to the past, many others lived as refugees from endless conflicts in countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. People fled famines and moved in poverty seeking economic opportunities. Many moved there with no documentation or very limited details and often in eras and circumstances where such records didn’t exist.

Then there’s the absolutely grim history of slavery and people bought and sold, families broken up and origins absolutely obscured and, you’ve Native American connections that were often obscured too by oppression and basically a history of conquest of lands, genocide and attempt erasure of a whole culture.

So for many Americans this is very different to most odd us sitting in Ireland or anywhere in Europe, as most of us have a fair idea of our family tree, even if it’s not that accurate and vague.

If you were adopted, particularly those who were adopted unofficially or illegally, this is also a hugely important technology as it opens up data to them that wouldn’t exist at all otherwise.

However for most of us in Ireland, we’re going to just find a pretty boring dataset that might give you some sense of very old migration patterns back to the Viking era etc, easily explained connections to Britain & continental Europe etc etc or some cousins who moved somewhere far flung, but that data is potentially useful for someone who may ultimately be connected to you and have no idea and is seeking that information because they don’t know.

Obviously your ancestry doesn’t define the person you are now and there’s a lot more to life than all of this but it’s still a huge deal to a lot of people to be able to know who their family were, even if it’s only vague notions.

In a broader demographic sense in old world countries like here, it can also can show migration patterns that explain history in a way that’s not just the records of those who won wars or were dominant culturally.

It can also tell a story that shows we were all migrants at some stage. In a way that to me challenges a lot of the nativism nonsense that goes on. Go back a few centuries in any family tree and you’ll find its a lot broader and more international than most people might realise.

Data is data though. You can use it for good or for bad purposes.

Personally I wouldn’t get too lost in this stuff. You are who you are. Go back far enough and you’ll ultimately find we’re all related anyway.

The bit I always find amusing is when you look at these family tree searches, someone will follow a particular line finding interesting characters, but when you go back a few generations the tree is so wide you’re often getting into thousands of individuals when you go out along any branch and go back very far and you’re talking about connections with huge numbers. It all becomes a bit of a pointless exercise.

Nqp15hhu wrote: »

Native Irish people often score a small mismatch of Scottish dna.

That’ll give you a fairly good idea of the historical mingling that took place on these islands

https://www.rcsi.com/dublin/news-and-events/news/news-article/2019/09/researchers-connect-irish-and-scottish-genetic-maps

Some of it tallies with political history, but more of it connects with stuff like research on movement of things like threads of stories in songs, linguistics, music and so on. A lot of those themes crop up again and again and will tie even into similar stuff in parts of Scandinavia and northern France.

There’s a lot of quite complex history and some of the movements don’t match geopolitical history.

It’s interesting in the sense that there are many, many layers that can show a lot of the realities of life, settlements, cultures, migration etc etc.