DNA – Not just for the Maury Povich Show or CSI
Have you wondered what all the hub-bub is about? When your cousin proudly said they’d had a DNA test done, did you just nod and silently wonder if there was finally proof that that cousin really did descend from a monkey? I did too. No, not the cousin, but just nodded, pretending I knew exactly what they were talking about and wondered just what the tests showed or proved and how would it help me. So I’ve set out to get to the bottom of it all.
I already knew it was painless, just a swab inside the cheek. Amazing, isn’t it? I also knew it was through the male line. That’s it. That’s all I knew. Probably what you knew, too. Or you might have known more than that. I wouldn’t be surprised. Hey! This is scientific stuff. Science and math were my worst subjects in school. So I set out to learn some details.
When I first heard about it, I pictured digging up dead folks, plucking a hair and testing to see if your DNA matched theirs. It just didn’t make sense that people were doing that! Actually, I was rather appalled. Surely that wasn’t what they did, but what did they do? How in the world could it connect one person to their ancestor?
Let’s say you’ve hit a brick wall. You suspect gggrandfather George was the son of Thomas, but have no connecting proof. George’s neighbor was John who has been proven to be the son of Thomas. George and John are very close in age, are both from South Carolina, and both have a child named Thomas. If both you and John’s gggrandson have your DNA tested and they have the same specific points then you’re pretty safe in concluding Thomas is the father of both John and George. The next hurdle will be finding Thomas’ parents and so on and so on. Even though that’s a fairly simple and ideal situation, it’s probably still clear as mud. Ancestry puts it like this, “By comparing your DNA Ancestry test results with others, you can determine to what extent you are related. For example, the more closely your result set matches another’s, the narrower the range of generations between the two of you and your common ancestor.”
The test will also reveal your ancient origins. Apes again? Nah. As tribes moved out of Africa, they settled all over the world. Each group became genetically distinct.
Males have a Y-chromosome that is passed from father to son completely unchanged. Gggggggrandfather Elijah will have the same Y-chromosome as his ggggggggrandson if it was father to son to grandson to great grandson to…. You get the picture. Just a little bit of God’s amazing work. He probably had many other, more important things in mind when He created Adam, but it is a nice help in establishing the paternal line.
You can read more about it all and purchase a kit at Ancestry.com DNA testing