Photo credit: Flavor of Love. MTV, Viacom
So now this makes me declare that I am a descendant of royalty somehow. :) Here is a screen capture from my 23andme report....
The paternal report tells me this fun little story and speaks about how rare my halogroup is. For my maternal side, they speak of me being traced back to a very common Viking warrior woman.
Photo credit: Comedy Awards 2016
This is all brings me to the question of you people who have been doing genealogy or ancestry for some time now. Is this a typical little gimmick that tends to come with everyone's report? From my attempt at amusing photos, you can see Flavor Flav wearing his royal crown and in the other image, his viking hat. Am I related to him as well?
There is a considerable amount of data to digest with the the report. Some web searches have shown me already that the same person sending samples to 4 different companies can end up with 4 very different results. I suppose as a novice to all of this, what else can I do with this data? It more or less jives with my lineage. It shows that my DNA is most often found in Europe, mainly Ireland and Germany, with 10% of it being from France. The Irish and German make sense. I never heard of any French relatives ever though. I did elect to make my information public to seek out other relatives. I did end up matching up with quite a few family names that I recognized out of the 952 results. Although, most of those 952 are a match by less than half a percent. Even my own first cousin dialed in at a 13% match. Is that typical? He is the son of my father's sister. Shouldn't that count be a little higher?
Feel free to explain or elaborate on this DNA sample stuff for me. I did the test for fun. I am not a genealogist. I did do a whole project a few years back on ancestry.com and got back about 150 years. I'd like to see if I can dig that out and find some other names to plug into their web site to see if they are possible matches. Anyone care to comment on this validity of a relationship with a King, or is this something where every 1 in 5 people gets thrown a bone like this that is completely difficult to verify? What about some of the other aspects of these services, such as the disposition of carrying a certain gene that could prove you as a possible contender to get a disease or to pass one on genetically?
Is there any meat to any of this, or is this a lot of astrology as one article that I read put it? Is there enough accuracy in the DNA testing to trace back birthrights and lineage? I know its good enough to send someone to jail, but that is typically firsthand comparing DNA found at a crime scene to that which a person possesses. We are talking about going back 10K years, and even in my report, as far back as 275K years to which an initial gene is identified.