Posts Tagged ‘genetics’

Just saying things for the sake of saying things.

At some point I’m going to want to go back into some of the about me pages that I have on here (which I don’t look forward to, which isn’t going to be fun because of how subsequent WordPress updates have changed how you can edit pages and widgets… what happened to set it and forget it?) and update them with new genealogy results, although WordPress making things less intuitive and more difficult to navigate isn’t going to make that fun at all. I like the fact that a lot of things are matching up running the same file (Ancestry) through various tests, because that speaks to the accuracy of the results and increases the likelihood that those results are accurate. I’ll get into those in later updates to this blog, because some of the results of those were surprising — as it was, I found out that one of my parents was adopted by their grandparents to try and hide the fact that their mother got pregnant with them while they were a teenager (and I’m sure that the wording of this makes it completely obvious which parent that was, although I’m not going to come out and say it for the sake of maintaining… some kind of civility on this blog, as that side of the family has not directly contacted me in some time now and I would personally like it to stay that way).

I am currently dying my hair colors that I have wanted to dye my hair for several months, and when the dye has completely settled in — for this round, as one of the colors is extremely light and will quite likely have to be re-dyed at periodic intervals to get it to “stick” — I may trim my bangs and split ends as well, and I may shorten my hair for the sake of shortening it. That will certainly make it easier to brush and deal with, and that will definitely help me avoid some of the migraines that I might otherwise have had and caused by virtue of brushing longer hair. Not only is this something that I want to do because it’s something that I want to do (even though my hair has been impervious to bleach and dye in general, for as many years back as I can possibly hope to remember), it makes me snicker in a bit of a petty way because of the petty people that complain online about the people who “burn” and “fry” their hair and “dye it funny colors”. Sometimes I wonder what business it is of theirs what colors other people dye their hair, but for the most part I don’t care.

Before I forget to post in more detail about this…

I’ve been tinkering around in GEDmatch because I’ve heard a lot of good things about using the website, even if it’s not always the easiest to understand. It is technical, so I’m going to need to break it down here.

In addition, I’ve been tinkering around with Genomelink, and I’m really interested with the results that they’ve given my 23andMe and Ancestry files (I always use the Ancestry ones for this sort of thing so that the same set of DNA is measured and quantified). I’ll post that picture in a bit, and some of the more detailed pictures describing my European heritage… I just don’t want to saturate my blog with a whole lot of screenshots and posts about those screenshots, but I do want to incorporate my findings in some way. Almost all of it corroborates what I’ve learned from previous tests, but certain trace DNA is more consistently coming up on these tests that was not and probably would not come up on Ancestry and 23andMe because those testing companies have become some of the least accurate that I have had the… pleasure of doing business with. As much as I like their family-finding features, their ethnicity estimates have not been accurate when it comes to me at all, and they become increasingly less accurate with each subsequent update and I hate it.

I’ve been tinkering around some in GEDmatch!

This has confirmed some things for me, and it’s revealed some others that… aren’t too surprising given what I know about my ethnicity and family history. I’ll be extrapolating more on those in subsequent posts as I have the time to do so. I’ve gotten better at reading the results that most of these tests give me by doing research that I hope to share here, even though most of this is still a work in progress (and might always be).

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