An online video about DNA, produced by Momondo, is very impressive. I would suggest every genealogist should watch it. Perhaps every human on the face of the earth should view it. I decided to encourage YOU to click on https://youtu.be/tyaEQEmt5ls to see what a DNA test could do for you. I was not familiar with Momondo so I looked it up on Wikipedia.org: “Momondo (stylised momondo) is a travel fare aggregator and travel fare metasearch engine. Momondo also operates a travel information blog, Inspiration. The website is a white-label of the Kayak.com subsidiary of Booking Holdings.” So why woul ..read more

A woman who was gifted an ancestry DNA kit says she has been left with more questions than answers after she received her results back. Katye Snow told her story on TikTok and explained how she discovered the man she grew up with and called Dad wasn’t her biological father. “A few months ago, my lovely brother got me one of those cool ancestry genealogy tests,” Ms Snow starts the video. “And because my father’s adopted and my mother doesn’t know her real father I thought it was really cool to figure out my genealogy maybe find out some medical issues I don’t know about. She was successful in f ..read more

Were your parents REALLY your parents? According to any article by Michael Cook in the BioEdge.com web site (that specializes in bioethics news): “A new field of litigation has evolved in the United State: denouncing fertility fraud. In the latest episode, a nation-wide firm, Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane & Conway, announced that it was pursuing two fertility doctors who allegedly used their own sperm a generation ago to get women pregnant and without informing them. This is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Adam Wolf, the lawyer handling the cases. He claims that hundreds of fertility fr ..read more

Genetic markers for the Clan MacDougall have been discovered by genealogy researchers at the University of Strathclyde. Dougall tartan The clan line they have discovered descends from Dougall, King of the Isle of Man and founder of the ancient Scottish Kingdom of the Isles and Lorn. Dougall (c1140-c1207) was the eldest son of Somerled, the ancient warrior sea-king and progenitor of the MacDonald, MacAllister, and MacDougall clans. If you have ancestry from one of these clans and if you think you have Scottish ancestry, you might want to know that you also have Scandinavian (Norse) ancestry a ..read more

Five days ago I published a press release written by Ancestry.com entitled Ancestry® Now Delivers More Precise Ethnicity Estimates and I added a couple of brief comments of my own. The article generated a lot of comments from newsletter readers, many of whom questioned if the new and “improved” results were really more accurate than earlier reports or if perhaps the new reports were even less accurate. That article is still available at https://blog.eogn.com/2020/09/11/ancestry-now-delivers-more-precise-ethnicity-estimates/. Now an article published in the Ancestry Blog explains the new resu ..read more

This undoubtedly will affect the sharing of DNA information for genealogy and many other purposes.   I suspect that GEDmatch.com will be affected, at least for any activities involving residents of California. The following is an extract from the jdsupra.com website, an online service that provides legal information to the legal community: justice statue “With the focus of personal privacy increasing, it is unsurprising that additional laws are being proposed to increase privacy rights, including the California Privacy Rights Act initiative on the ballot this upcoming November. Mor ..read more

Warren G. Harding The grandson of former US President Warren G Harding has launched a legal bid to have the Republican’s remains exhumed to confirm they are related. James Blaesing is the grandson of Nan Britton who was Harding’s mistress while the president was still married to Florence (Kling) Harding. James Blaesing told a court he wants to establish his ancestry with “scientific certainty”. But other members of Harding’s family have opposed the request, filed in May. You can read more about this story in an article in the BBC News website at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-5414 ..read more

Those of us who have taken multiple DNA tests from different DNA companies have often experienced results where all the tests did not agree with each other.  As stated in today’s announcement from Ancestry.com: “While your DNA doesn’t change, the science we use to determine your ethnicity estimates does. Advances in the algorithms used to analyze your DNA and increases in the size and diversity of the reference panel can help you connect to even more regions around the world. As our DNA network grows and science advances, you can expect more comprehensive and precise results.” My interpre ..read more

95 African Americans whose remains were discovered in 2018 at a Fort Bend Independent School District (Texas) construction site. As the community has debated the future of the site and how to honor the dead, little has been known about those buried there except that they were likely part of the state’s brutal convict-leasing system. That changed this month, when Fort Bend ISD released a 500-page report providing more information about the discovery and tentatively identifying 72 of the persons believed to be buried at the previously unmarked cemetery. DNA analysis is now starting to reveal the ..read more

The following announcement was written by 23andMe: This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted 23andMe a 510(k) clearance for a pharmacogenetics report on two medications, clopidogrel, prescribed for certain heart conditions, and citalopram, which is prescribed for depression. The decision this week modifies the labeling of the previously authorized CYP2C19 Drug Metabolism report which was granted FDA authorization in 2018. The new 510(k) clearance for the pharmacogenetics report for CYP2C19 modifies the labeling to remove the need for confirmatory testing and allo ..read more