Monday, January 9, 2012

My Family Finder Autosomal Test Results - Post 1

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One of the prizes in the AARP "Discover Your Roots" Contest I won was a Family Tree DNA test.  Since I already had done a Y-DNA test and a mitochondrial DNA test, I opted for the autosomal test, called Family Finder on the Family Tree DNA website. 

I received the test kit, did the two cheek swabs and sent it back in late October. In early December, I was notified by FTDNA that the results of my kit were posted on the FTDNA website.  With everything happening in December, I didn't really look at the results.

According to the FamilyTreeDNA website, the Family Finder test provides:

"This autosomal test, available for both men and women, examines SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) across the 22 autosomal chromosome pairs.  These chromosomes contain DNA from all sides of your family. The Family Finder test examines hundreds of thousands of SNP positions and uses the results to find recent relatives and geographic origins."

I won't go through everything on the FamilyTreeDNA website, but I do want to highlight my results and, in the next post, the shared DNA segments with several distant relatives.

On the Family Tree DNA page for myFTDNA, after I signed in, I saw the "Genealogy" page


On this page, I went through the process of adding my GEDCOM file and, after doing so, I could view my GEDCOM file results by clicking on either the "My Paternal ancestors" link or the "My Maternal ancestors" link.  Here is a view of "My Paternal Ancestors" for five generations (the site permits you to view up to 9 generations):


As you can see, when I run my mouse over one of the persons on the tree, their name, birth and death information appears.

To see my Family Finder test results, I went to the "Family Finder" button on the menu row of the "myFTDNA" page - the options are "Learn More," "Matches," "Advanced Matching," "Chromosome Browser," "Download Raw Data," "Known Matches" and "Population Finder."

I figured that I was a 100% red-blooded Western European guy in my DNA and just knew that the "Population Finder" test would come out all one color.

Surprise! (two screens here):



The Family Finder autosomal DNA test indicates that my DNA is 89.15% Western European (Orcadian) and 10.85% Middle East (Palestinian, Bedouin, Bedouin South, Druze, Jewish).

The map shows that the Western European area is the British Isles (which includes the Orkney Islands - Orcadians) and the Sudan-Egypt-Israel-Syria-Arabia area of the Middle East.  The British Isles portion doesn't surprise me in the least.  My father's ancestry was 100% British Isles in the 1600s as far as I know;  my mother's ancestry was about 50% British Isles, with maybe 25% German origin and smaller amounts of Dutch and French ancestry, in the 1600s.

Whoa!  What?  What mysteries lurk in my ancestral woodpile?  I'm thinking that the Middle East segments may come from the known German, Dutch and French segments of my ancestry.  But who knows - someone may have created a surprise paternal event that I haven't figured out yet. 

I'll look at my chromosomes, and how Family Tree DNA shows matches, in the next post.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/01/my-family-finder-autosomal-test-results.html

Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2012.

8 comments:

Jenny Jones said...

Thanks, great post! I'm now waiting for results of my first DNA test. Have not done the autosomal yet, lucky you for winning it!

Heather Wilkinson Rojo said...

I'm not surprised, Randy, since all your European ancestors at some point passed through the Middle East on their journey from Africa. My husband's DNA test showed him to be J1 on the paternal side, and H on his mother's side (a match to my maternal side). When we remembered our Spanish history, it all began to make sense (years of Roman, and then Moorish rule before the reconquest in 1492).

David Green said...

Thank you, Randy, great post. I look forward to receiving that notice some time in late Feb. since I just sent my tests back last week. I started with the Y- test first and I was going to do x- test next. But after reading this I may go to Family finder next.
Heather, thank you for that note - it does make perfect sense with migrations to the West. I hadn't considered that before.
I will be posting my results on my blog as soon as they come in. Cheers.

Michael R. Maglio said...

My Population Finder came back with 27.67% MiddleEast etc. For me that corresponded almost exactly with my Y-DNA Haplogroup G results

Anonymous said...

I ordered the family finder test on sale for $174.

I was not happy with the amount of info for the money!

I feel like the most I got was an invitation to spend more money.

Anonymous said...

I had similar results with 92% Orcadian and 8% middle eastern, but have been disappointed in the results so far. It merely confirmed what I already knew, that my ancestry is from Great Britain. I had no close relationships revealed and nobody who had posted a relative in common. I had hoped that my european relatives would be in the database, but it seems to be only people from the U.S.

Anonymous said...

I had similar results with 92% Orcadian and 8% middle eastern, but have been disappointed in the results so far. It merely confirmed what I already knew, that my ancestry is from Great Britain. I had no close relationships revealed and nobody who had posted a relative in common. I had hoped that my european relatives would be in the database, but it seems to be only people from the U.S.

Anonymous said...

I read in the comments that you are African. But your results and picture look European...