The hot trend in genealogy research these days is DNA testing. You fill a tube with spit and send it off to a lab and a few weeks later they send you an analysis of your genetic heritage and offer to put you in touch with people you might be related to. My son sent me one of these kits for Christmas, so last month I spent half an hour generating enough spit to fill the tube (it’s harder than you think) and sent it off.
The basic result is something I could have figured out by looking in the mirror: my DNA is 100% European and 98% Northern European. The red hair and blue eyes were an unsubtle clue. That’s mostly English and Scottish (from both sides), some Scandinavian (maybe a Viking raider or two), a healthy dose of German (from my mother’s mother), and tiny sprinklings of things like Italian and Ashkenazi.
There's a t-shirt
I also have 2.6% Neanderthal DNA. There was a time when we didn’t believe the Neanderthals could breed with the ancestors of modern humans. We considered them an extinct and, by definition, inferior evolutionary dead end. Now we know that most modern humans have genetic ties with the hairy cavemen of yore. (Insert sexist joke here.) My 2.6% is close to average for European populations.
When you set up your profile on the testing company’s website, you enter a list of surnames you are researching and places your ancestors have lived. The company’s computers compare your DNA with that of all the other people who have used their service and pulls up a list of people with matching DNA segments. The list shows you the surnames and place they have entered in their profiles, and gives an estimate of the degree of relatedness.
My results showed me hundreds of people who might be related to me, most of them estimated to be “third to distant cousins.” I don’t have to work nearly that hard to find sketchy people I’d rather not be related to, so I decided I’m only looking for somewhat closer relatives at the moment. I combed through to find people who listed surnames I recognized and that was a dry hole.
With one exception. At the top of my list was someone estimated to be a second or third cousin, located in Australia, and listing the surname Thiele. That was my mother’s mother’s name. So I sent off a request for contact and received an almost immediate reply from Julia Thiele, who lives in Melbourne and shares a common great-grandfather with me.
Melbourne had not been on our itinerary for this trip, but I think it’s worth a day-trip from Sydney to meet a cousin I didn’t know about who may be able to fill in a rather thin branch on my family tree. I'll keep you posted.