Genealogy is Magic

It truly is: it can make an entire evening disappear, with maybe just a birth certificate to show for all the time gone.

I never got genealogy. I couldn't see the attraction of rummaging through old records or wandering about in graveyards looking for distant ancestors. But I'm adopted, and a month ago I finally decided to try to trace my birth mother. Armed with a name and a rough address from 53 years ago, I signed up to ancestry.co.uk and started searching. At first I thought its search facility was appalling: so bad I had to be doing something wrong. I was. I still think it leaves a lot to be desired in ease of use, but with exploration of its features it turns out to be extremely powerful. I could soon see a record of my mother entering the country at Southampton (gave me a date of birth), and shortly afterwards I found her full address in New Zealand in 1957, as well as the names of her parents.

The New Zealand electoral registers are all searchable online, but only up to 1981. Also, the register is only compiled every three years. Still, I could track the family's movements to a fair extent, and found the name of another individual I presumed (correctly) was my uncle.

Then I found that the New Zealand government had an online search website that lets you look up births, deaths and marriages, providing they're at least a few decades in the past, or, for deaths, the deceased was born at least 80 years ago. For a small payment they will email you a PDF of the relevant document.

At this point I sort of lost the original plot, and began tracing my family tree. Matching up disparate records had turned into a hugely engaging intellectual puzzle, and best of all, one you can do sat at a computer. You can trust nothing, because filling in forms is a boring activity and mistakes get made. An 'o' was transcribed as an 'a', a person is born with one set of first names but dies with another, possibly somebody lies about their age. Evidence has to be weighed up, possibilities have to be sorted through. Lovely.

I finally 'got' genealogy.

As I predicted in an earlier post (The End of Genealogy), I'd gone back three generations when I bumped into somebody else's family tree: a truly massive affair with a cast of dozens, possibly hundreds, of people (it's hard to tell). If a married couple in that tree were also two of my great grandparents, then I could go back another three generations into 18th century Ireland. Exciting stuff, but as I explored this huge tree that someone (or surely an army of genealogists) had patiently built up, the scope of the job I'd begun came home to me: everybody has a big, big number of ancestors.

I went back to trying to locate my living relatives.

Revisiting the search websites armed with more experience of how to use them properly, I found a death certificate for my grandmother. From that I found a death notice on a site dedicated to finding them, which led me to a report on a local newspaper site, which gave me the names of an aunt and uncle. The aunt was on Facebook, so I finally bit the bullet and created a Facebook account. In another post I might talk about how much I dislike Facebook's user experience, so I won't bother now complaining about how it's constantly presenting me with names of people I've never heard of asking if I want to friend them, even though I've already told it several times already that I don't, or how sending a message to a person you're not friends with results in them not seeing it, or how their friend finder was unable to find "Charles Anderson York" even though it found loads of other Charles Andersons. No, I won't talk about that right now. Let's just say that, after a week of waiting for a reply to a message sent to the 'Other' inbox, I paid 35p to send the same message directly to my aunt's main inbox and I finally made contact with a birth relative other than my son.

My birth mother is no longer with us, but at least now I know, and I've discovered relatives that before I could only speculate about. I've also found out where the 3.8% Jewish ancestry that 23andMe identified comes from. (The 2.9% Neanderthal inheritance remains unaccounted for.)

I'll finish by saying that I am truly amazed at how much of this type of information is now available via the internet. And it will only get better as the genealogy sites get smarter and more knowledgeable. Since finding my birth relatives I've tried doing the same for my adopted parents. Both of them are already on other people's trees; all I have to do is cross some T's and dot some I's. And even if you're not into genealogy, genetic testing sites like 23andMe will connect you with your relatives as an optional extra. Soon we will all be related.

My Neanderthal Past

Interesting news from 23andMe, the organisation that sequences your DNA and reports on your genetic health risks. As a side benefit they can find out information about your ancestors, and this time they've really surpassed themselves. It turns out that 2.9% of my DNA is Neanderthal, a species that Homo Sapiens parted company with tens of thousands of years ago. Seems that some of my ancestors kept in touch though.

That was all a long time ago, so I'm happy to put aside the shame and let bygones be bygones. In any case, the average value for 23andMe customers is 2.5%, and Homo Neanderthalensis are no longer believed to have been the slow-witted brutes we once thought. In related news, I do not appear to have any Native American ancestors, and they reckon I'm ten times more likely to have ancestors from Ireland and Poland than from Britain.

Even though I've got a reasonable understanding of how scientists come by this information, I'm still staggered that it's possible at all. The lives of people who've been dead for hundreds of years are now being illuminated again. As their descendants discover their common ancestors, we can deduce where and when these people might have lived, even how many children they might have had. And this science is still in its infancy.

My Genes and Me

A few weeks ago Matt Ridley, the Rational (but possibly a bit over-) Optimist, wrote a blog entry condemning moves in the US to block people getting their genomes decoded. Apparently doctors over there feel that this should only be possible by going through them. There are actually strong arguments for this, as the field of Personal Genomics is still very immature, we don't understand a lot of what our DNA can tell us, and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, particularly when placed in the hands of the health-conscious types who would go to the bother of having their genome sequenced. Nevertheless, I agreed with the thrust of his argument that it's our DNA, and we should be allowed to get it sequenced if we want to.

He was going to make a stand by getting his own DNA sequence through an American company called 23andMe, a name I've bumped into on several occasions in the last few months, in podcasts, blogs and articles. I had understood that the cost was still in the tens of thousands but, intrigued, I made my own way over to the site. Turns out that for just $199 + $60 postage I could get my genome sequenced. I couldn't resist, and ordered the testing kit. (And now I see they've reduced it to $99. Oh well, that's actually to my long term benefit, if it encourages more people to get it done.)

It arrived almost immediately, and I dutifully filled up a test tube with spit, put it into the courier pouch and sent it back. "Six to eight weeks", they said, but it was nearer three. I got the e-mail telling me the results were ready, and nervously logged into their website.

I should add at this point that they don't really sequence the whole 3 billion base pairs of your DNA: just stretches where there is useful knowledge to be gained. And even in these areas they're not looking at all possible deviations, just what are called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), where a single base is altered. Despite this they have dozens of comparisons they can make, all rated according to the confidence you can have in the research behind them.

I looked at the Health Results first. These could have contained seriously bad news, but in fact there are only three conditions for which I have a substantially increased risk (other than ones where the base risk is really low to start with), and for all three there's nothing much you can do to avoid them that I wasn't already doing. The worst offender was prostrate cancer, for which a diet rich in tomatoes may be effective. Or may not. Either way, my food is going to look considerably redder from now on. I will also make sure that the doctor doesn't skip the prostrate check again when I have my annual health check up. (It may not be much fun for them, but then it's no picnic for me either.) On the plus side, they think I have a significantly reduced chance of developing Alzheimer's, which could be very useful if the retirement age keeps going up.

In the section about heritable conditions, it seems I am not a carrier for anything they can test. Good news for my son. In the section about traits they successfully managed to give me only a typical chance of having the two that I know for certain I do have. They said the same about the one medical condition I have, which does make me wonder a bit about how accurate the diagnoses are. However, part of the payment is a $5 a month subscription, so I can keep up to date with new medical advances.

Finally, I went to what turned out to be the most interesting section of all: my ancestry. They anonymously match you up with any close relatives who've also been tested, and you can make contact with any that want to be contacted. The nearest they found for me are (probable) fourth cousins, which means we share a common great-great-great-grandparent. That's quite a way back; however, as more and more people join 23andMe (no doubt tempted by the new low price), the chances of bumping into a closer relative increase accordingly.

Even more fascinating was the tracking of my paternal and maternal lines. On my father's side I seem to be descended from someone in Britain, Ireland or the Basque country. Sounds plausible enough. However, on my mother's side I can trace my line to a group made up principally of Ashkenazi Jews, Kurds and Druze. For geographical reasons I am inclined to rule out the Kurds and the Druze, so that means I am probably, and I have to admit unexpectedly, partly Jewish.

Strictly speaking, what it really means is that my mitochondria are Jewish, as they're what carry the DNA that is passed down from mother to daughter, and the mother to daughter line is only one of thousands of possible ways you can follow your family tree backwards, so the total Jewish part of my DNA might be very small. However, I find myself considerably amused by this: I was adopted as a baby, and because my birth mother was a Catholic I was entrusted to a (nominally) Catholic family. My adopted mother had converted to Catholicism when she married my father, but had been brought up a Lutheran. Her father though was partly Jewish. So all things come around.