My great adventure begins

I got my 23andMe results last night.  The first thing I did was sign up for Relative Finder. I was disappointed that it would take up to a week to get the results. So I looked at all my other information, while I waited for Relative Finder. Here’s what I found:

• I am a completely boring white guy.  My maternal and paternal haplogroups are the main European ones, and the Ancestry Painter (which looks at autosomes) says I am 100% European.  Not 98%, not 99%, but 100%.
• No health findings to speak of, except for a significant risk of macular degeneration.
• There’s a story in my family of Indian ancestry, but it’s just a story, so I was happy to see that 23andMe has a Native American Ancestry Finder. But again I was disappointed. I have no detectable Indian ancestry in the past five generations. So, the story is probably not true.

Then I downloaded my raw data. This is one of their strengths of 23andMe. If they fold, I still have my data, and I can pay other providers to analyze it at any time in my life. Or do it myself.

Next I took the raw data and ran it through Promethease, which I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Promethease (I love that name) is a software program that analyzes data from 23andMe or Navigenics. It outputs a very long and detailed report, relying on information in SNPedia (which is a genomics wiki also run by Mr. Cariaso). In my case, Promethease took about two hours to run, and then I stayed up half the night looking through the report. I was overwhelmed by all the data, and more than a little confused. But still it was great fun, and I recommend it. I’m toying with the idea of posting my Promethease report, which some other folks have done.

Then, today, the Relative Finder data came in. Wow! Apparently, I have lots and lots of cousins (well, duh), five of whom wanted to make contact. Most of them are genealogists, but I think I’m not going to be much help to them, since (despite all my good intentions) I have not traced my ancestors past my great-grandparents. But still, it’s very exciting, somehow, to find these real connections to people all over the world. I responded to all of them, and we’ll see where that leads.

There’s something else I’m looking forward to, when I have the time. I’d like to run my data through Structure, which is a program for analyzing population structure.  I don’t think I’ll learn much (because of my white-bread heritage), but I want to do it just for fun, since I found instructions on the European Genetics and Anthropology Blog.