Ancient Mitochondrial DNA

Another interesting match in the database at 23andMe!

A. H. was adopted and has no genealogy to share.  She matches my father's cousin on a small segment on chromosome 22.

Using the new Ancestry Composition feature available at 23andMe, we can see that her ancestry is roughly three quarters European and one quarter Asian.  This reflects at least five generations on all of her ancestral lines.

23andMe
Ancestry Composition of distant cousin A. H.

Previously written in the WEIRD post, most people in the database are of European ancestry.  So the first observation we can make about A. H. is that her genetic cousins at 23andMe will be of European ancestry and not Asian because that is the population in the sample.  Very few people of Asian heritage are available for her comparison.

Next we get to the maternal haplogroup of A. H.  Maternal haplogroups are named with letters and numbers and reflect ancient migratory paths tens of thousands of years ago when people lived, reproduced, and died within the same few miles of their parents and their parents and so forth.  The time before ships, trains, planes, and cars could quickly transport people all over the world.  This is great for anthropologists.  This is not really relevant for genealogists.  Written records of genealogical value are scarce as we travel back in time; some places simply have no surviving records.  Learning your maternal haplogroup, or where one of your thousands of ancestral lines lived 30,000 years ago, is not going to help you uncover the name of Mary Thompson's husband whom she married in between the 1870 and 1880 census.

Current DNA analysis of mitochondrial haplogroups shows that people originated in Africa
and traveled (very gradually) across the globe.  After thousands of years,
the DNA of mitochondria gradually mutated within sequestered groups,
giving rise to different haplogroups.

The Science:  Maternal haplogroups are determined by mitochondria.  They are the "powerhouses" of cells, if you remember back to your biology class.  Mitochondria contain their own unique DNA separate from the DNA contained in the cell's nucleus.  DNA in the nucleus is reconfigured, or recombines, when sex cells are created in preparation for reproduction, with only half the cell's original DNA getting passed on to offspring.  In contrast, the DNA in mitochondria does not change except for tiny mutations that occur every few thousand years.  You have your mother's mitochondrial DNA and not your father's because the mitochondria in sperm are destroyed before or at conception.

Drawing of mitochondria.

A. H.'s maternal haplogroup is L1b1a6.  This is interesting because this is a Western/Northern African haplotype, yet A. H. has no detectable African heritage in her.  If A. H. were able to trace her direct maternal line, she would eventually end up in this area of the world.  The problem is that this may take hundreds of generations, which is not possible with the written records available to us.  No records about A. H. are available to her because she was adopted.  23andMe has provided her with her first glimpse of her origins.

23andMe

Knowing your maternal or paternal haplogroup is kind of like getting the answer, but not the equation.  We are skipping over thousands of years of genealogy not recoverable to us and seeing where one of our lines was living.

Confirming WEIRD

Last February, I wrote about the WEIRD situation in studies:  subjects are usually Western and Educated and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries.  This is true in the genetic genealogy testing field as well.  My father has hundred of relatives in the database at 23andMe.  My mother has thousands.  Rarely does the African-American lady whose account I manage receive any new matches, leaving her still hovering around sixty matches.

23andMe recently offered a new survey asking the people in their genetic database to report their ethnicity.

Here is the snapshot of the answers:

23andMe
Replies to the ancestry/ethnicity question.

People who identify themselves as European comprise three quarters of the database.  If you are not of mostly European heritage, you will likely not find many relatives in the database.  As more people test, additional relatives will become available, but you need to keep this in mind when you either find very few relatives or all of your relatives look European, especially if you know otherwise in your family tree.

Amanuensis Monday: 1847 Marriage of Bishop and Blinn

Ongoing transcription of hand-written notes found in the BISHOP family file at the NewYork State Library in Albany.

The writing is difficult to decipher on this negative copy of this bible record of a marriage.

Using Picasa by Google, which is free, I can invert the colors and play with the saturation and shadows to make the writing clearer.

Mr Ashley Blinn and Miss Caroline Bishop married April 14^th, 1847

In Canaan, Columbia County, New York.

In the 1850 census, the couple was living in Austerlitz, Columbia County, New York.  Caroline's age was listed as 39 years, while her husband was 61.

1850 United States Federal Census
Austerlitz, Columbia County, New York
Ancestry.com