Love, Life & Beauty After Fifty

If you've been following my blog, you'll remember that back at the beginning of May, I decided I wanted to do a couple DNA tests to see if I could determine where my ancestors immigrated from on my Mom's side of the family (you can check out that blog here ) I ordered two tests - one from Ancestry DNA and one from MyHeritage DNA - and you'll also remember that I had some issues with the MyHeritage DNA test, so chose to do a third test through 23andMe (you can check out that blog here ) Now onto my 23andMe DNA results (I will be doing a comparison of ethnicity percentages from both Ancestry and 23andMe in a future blog) The 99% European can be further broken down: The other 1% is a mishmash of ethnicities - which according to 23andMe goes back 8+ generations: With the 23andMe test, you can trace your Ancestry Timeline which outlines how many generations ago your most recent ancestor for each population was from: 23andMe delves furt...

They are in!  I was so excited when I received the email from Ancestry.ca that my DNA results were available to view. As I mentioned in my first blog (you can check that out here ), I had a very good idea of where my ancestors immigrated from on my Dad's side of the family but did not know very much about where my ancestors came from on my Mother's side. I clicked on the email with excitement! My genetic ethnicity results indicated 93% Europe and 7% West Asia Europe West (This corroborates my Dad's research) Italy/Greece Europe East Great Britain (This one indicated that it was a low confidence region) Caucasus and Middle East (Both of these were also indicated as a low confidence region) First off - what is a low confidence region? Taken directly from Ancestry.ca - To calculate your ethnicity, we run 40 separate tests on randomly selected portions of your DNA. The bottom number in a range is the smallest amount of an ethnicity that app...

After my bad experience with the MyHeritage DNA test (see that blog here ), I decided to try the 23andMe DNA test in spite of it being the fairly pricey option (which was my hesitation when first looking for DNA tests).  Yes I know, I should have just gone with 23andMe in the beginning - live and learn. I saw that 23andMe was having a sale for Father's Day where the kits were $199 CDN vs $249 regularly, so placed my order on June 2nd, and received my kit on June 9th. I excitedly opened the box, although from doing the Ancestry DNA test, I knew what to expect. What I liked about this test, is it is returned prepaid to 23andMe here in Canada, complete with tracking (for privacy I will not be showing the tracking information) As with the two previous tests, prior to mailing the package back to 23andMe, you are required to active your tests online.  The process was again quick and easy, although with 23andMe you are required to answer a few additional ques...