I do not think that means what you think it means, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya

I really do not care for genealogical genetics. I believe they promise you conclusions based on dubious assumptions so that you'll feel a sense of belonging, when most people, including myself, don't understand the intricacies that can go into genetics beyond simple Mendelian inheritance. I don't think the conclusions they reach regarding people are any better than the companies who purport to tell you what breed your dog is.  Beyond that, there is the matter of how utterly stupid it is to freely give a for-profit company your genetic material that they may monetise later.

Population genetics are a different matter, though, so I find this fascinating, and I loved the following quote:

In any given population, the number of lines in your family tree that reach any specific medieval person is about the same between you and everyone else who belongs to the same population you do. In other words, everyone alive today is equally related, genealogically, to all medieval people from that population.>In any given population, the number of lines in your family tree that reach any specific medieval person is about the same between you and everyone else who belongs to the same population you do. In other words, everyone alive today is equally related, genealogically, to all medieval people from that population.

 

DNA says you’re related to a Viking, a medieval German Jew or a 1700s enslaved African? What a genetic match really means

I've been doing some research

both for a character in the game and for my own family (they are both linked by Massachusetts, so that wasn't a random progression).

I knew that one of my ancestors, Edouard Bompasse, came to Plymouth in 1621 on the ship Fortune, which was the second ship to land there after the Mayflower, right after the so-called 'First Thanksgiving'. I found out that on that same ship was Philip Delano, an ancestor of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Also, Edouard was apparently part of the Leyden group and so was, indeed, a Pilgrim. His family settled in Marshfield, Duxbury, and Scituate, near Plymouth. Eventually his grandson, Samuel, left there and went down to Virginia, where he became a tobacco grower who, it is said, was drowned by his own slaves. From there the family moved to North Carolina, and eventually to Tennessee, near Clarksville, and then married into the Broadbent family, which moved to Cadiz, Kentucky and so then spawned my grandfather (who to be honest, I never met--falling out with fathers runs in my family, apparently). So I am the 14th generation living here in the US on that side. On another side I'm the ninth generation living in Kentucky (and on that side there was a story of a man and his sons who hid in a South Carolina woodpile eating snakes when the Indians attacked--his wife and daughter were killed). That was the Cobb family (my most famous relation, a many-degreed cousin, was Ty Cobb, the baseball player.) All in all my family is Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, maybe some Cornish, and a little bit of Indian mixed in, according to family tradition (My paternal great-great grandmother was supposed to be Blackfoot, and there's Cherokee on my mother's side).

There was one Bumpus cousin who was publicly whipped for having sex with a man in the Plymouth Colony. Well, he was whipped and he had to pay money to her family (I gather he may have been married, and of course was the man, so was seen as the more responsible party, whereas she was whipped for not protesting his advances enough, but was not married, so there was no serious breach of the adultery laws. (I'm not sure how it was with the Pilgrims, but in the actual text of the Bible, and in Judaism, it's only adultery if the woman is married, as a man could have more than one wife during Biblical times.)

So, Pilgrims, Indians, slaveholders, blacksmiths, yeoman farmers--a little bit of everything went into to produce me. Almost all of my ancestors were some kind of independent farmer of various means, until the last generation, really, moving about the country to find new opportunities but then settling for generations once they were found. Some fought in the Revolution. There were those on both sides of the Civil War, too, and of course both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. I love genealogy. I'd like to learn more about the lesser researched members of the family. My mom and aunt are working on the Craig, Lamb, and Reardon families. I know just a bit about the my Duncan side of the family. Of course, I am a librarian, and there's so much more available than there used to be with online forums, but the problem is finding the time to do it.

Must remember to blog and not just tweet

(Sometimes when I get home I'm so tired the little micro-blogging of Twitter is appealing. The updates show up on the left panel of this blog, too, if you're interested.)

Anyway, here's what's going on in my life:

1) Tuesday I had a seminar on searching EBSCOHost's CINAHL with Full Text. I must admit, I was somewhat bored, but aspects of it were interesting. And they had ice cream. :) I went over to a friend's and read, did some stuff, then came home by bus and crashed.

2) Wednesday...wait, what did I do Wednesday? Oh, yeah. I went in a little early to work to stop by Walgreens for a Luna bar only to find they were out of Lemon Zest. I walked 20 minutes to work (I'm REALLY out of shape--it's like two or three blocks) only to open up my desk and find...a couple of Luna bars. Sigh. I was surprised by how grown up the little creek I used to walk by had become; a small catalpa tree has soared, intertwining with wild rose. I couldn't see any fish at all, it was so shady. I returned a phone call from a genealogist working on my family tree (no relation; he's doing it for his nephew, who's my distant cousin) and I cheerfully anwered all sorts of questions/volunteered quite a bit even though I don't know this guy from Adam. That's me, alright. Maybe I warmed up to him so quickly because he's gay. I also let slip that a now-deceased great-uncle was actually adopted by the grandparents when one of their daughters had the boy out of wedlock. In the report the guy sent me, it listed me as the source of that one. Hopefully I won't piss off anyone in the family. Then I worked, went home and napped, then went to job #2 till 10 pm. One of our employees has given in her two weeks' notice. :( I got my schedule for the week. Then I came home and crashed.

3) Today I woke up early (although not quite as early as I intended), walked to bank, went through drive-through, withdrew money (couldn't get a money order via drive-through but the lobby wasn't open yet), walked to the gas station, got a money order for my rent, and then my boss drove me back over to my rental office to drop it off since she was doing a gas survey and then took me on to work. :) I worked at the hospital. I moved my PT appointment to tomorrow, since there was no way to bus out there and back in time for job #2. I talked to the mechanic whose name I was given. He's thinking from what I told him it may be in the $350 range, but of course he hasn't seen it yet. I came home and talked to my mom and grandmother on the phone. My mom is trying to quit smoking, yay! Her asthma's been really bad. My grandmother is having cataract surgery next month. Then I took a brief nap. I walked to work for truck night. I talked to one of the truck drivers who is also a mechanic. He suggested I get the 'with-everything' estimate and then I plan to get the 'what-will-be-the-least-I-can-spend-to-make-it-safe' estimate, too. I'll have about $500 to spend on brakes at the end of the month. The garage guy said that if I didn't have enough for what needs to be done they could store it for a couple of weeks so I can get the money together.

One good thing about the car being out of commission is I'm getting more rest. I'm hoping to get my house a little better together; my landlady mentioned that it needed some work. I am such a slob, and yet I hate living in a messy house.

Well, that's it for now. The plan is to get up by 6 am (I was in bed from 10 pm-midnight, but got up since I was hungry) and get some work/laundry done. I found some useful things for the game that I'd like to give the other players. We're nearly at the climax of the Antarctic adventure. The other day at the seminar, one of the librarians mentioned she was going on an Antarctic cruise around Christmas (high summer for there) and someone asked how cold it would be and I piped up and told them, given my now reasonably decent knowledge of Antarctic summer conditions. One thing I will say about this module; they did their homework in terms of research. Now if they'd just laid the thing out better!

Two gems from YKWIA

Chute Find Rekindles D.B. Cooper Legend

For some reason I thought the money came from a bank robbery, but it was ransom for the passengers he'd taken hostage in the hijacking. This parachute that they're looking at may have been one given to the man who identified himself as Dan Cooper (not DB as it has come down in the legend).

Obama Related to Pitt, Clinton to Jolie

My theory is that if you go back far enough, you're related to someone famous. I'm related to Ty Cobb, for instance. But it's funny when you've got Obama related to both Bush AND Cheney. :)

Cool (so long as you're not related to them)

Colon cancer risk traced to common ancestor, a married couple who came from England in 1630. Researches were able to gather information from the Mormon genealogical records in Utah to study a family in that state who has a mutation making them more likely to have attenuated familial adenomatous polyposis (AFAP), which makes you have a 2/3 higher chance of colon cancer than the rest of the population. They've identified a New York branch of the family as well, although they're not releasing the names of the couple.