[ExI] 23andme again

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: Re: [ExI] 23andme again

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 11:48 PM, spike wrote: <snip>

>> ...  But what a sitch: these two 
> sleepwalkers get caught nearly a century and a half later.
>

>...The big genealogy web sites are getting involved in gene research as
well.

>.... up to 10% of the breeding was off-piste for a variety of reasons (good
and bad), that invalidates a lot of the family trees. And there are also
mistakes and omissions in the records. ...BillK

_______________________________________________

BillK, that is exactly the reason why I decided to not invest another minute
into genealogy 20 some years ago.  It is interesting and insightful, but if
you can find all 32 of your great^3 grandparents, you may eventually find
only about half of them are genetically related.  I found some good evidence
of exactly that, two decades before 23andMe.

But all the stuff a fourth cousin and I are now doing can theoretically be
automated.  It is easy to imagine a company that uses the same 100 dollar
spit kit used by 23 starts up with the explicit mission of finding out that
kind of information.  That info has been obscured by time, poor records and
in many cases, intentional obscuration.  Some people don't want it known
that their ancestors did all the same kinds of things modern people do.  

It would be a really cool programming challenge to create a software toolbox
which would browse through a collection of data, census records, time and
place data, then create a profile to determine ways to explain why two
people are showing up as related even if there are no common names in their
old family bibles.

spike