Slashdot Mirror
Ancestry.com To Add DNA Test Results
Spamicles writes "For less than $200 and a cheek-swiped cotton swab, you will soon be able to add DNA results to family tree Web sites. Ancestry.com plans to launch the DNA testing product by the end of summer, offering customers the possibility of finding DNA matches in the site's 24,000 genealogical databases. By taking a simple cheek-swab test and comparing results against DNA profiles in a test-results database, virtually anyone can uncover genealogical associations unimaginable just a few years ago. Users can easily connect with and discover lost or unknown relatives within a few generations, as well as gain insight into where their families originated thousands of years ago."
This has been available for a while at www.fbi.gov. Users can easily connect with and discover lost or unknown crimes they have committed, as well as gain insight into the legal system and prison food.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Why would I want to find out that I have more?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I had a genealogy site up a few years ago. I eventually took it down due to complaints from my (extended) family regarding privacy concerns. I had people emailing me asking to remove their mothers' maiden names from the database.
God only knows how something like ancestry.com manages to keep afloat with all the privacy concerns.
P.S. I would try to put my database back up and require registration for searching, but there is no way for me to validate any registration (to avoid identity theives), so the point is probably moot.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Doctors calculate that about 5-10% of all children have a different biological father than they (and their "social" fathers) think.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I was pretty interested in the service that would trace your genetic heritage- race, country of origin (or percentage, etc)- it would have been fascinating. My uncle has mapped his side of the family (1/2 mine) back to the 1400's... so this extra step would be incredible to combine with.
Then... there's the privacy aspect. But just because I didn't do anything, yet, doesn't mean....
It'll be interesting to see.
Anyone, who is thinking about committing a crime, shouldn't do this.
Also, for 200$, wouldn't it be nice to find out the DNA of your neighbours?
I'm gonna buy myself some more Q-tips.
let the stream of paranoia utter forth at the idea of a website requesting your DNA..
OMG..GATTICA..BIG BROTHER, ALIENS UP MY REAR END.. HARP.. CHENEYBUSHFIELDRICE..MOON LANDING..
etc.. you get the idea..
personally though, I would be interested in the results they can display on the web based no that.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Give the people some sugar and they will willingly hand over what they normally wouldn't give you at gunpoint...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I hope people realise that when they post DNA it's not just their own but also contains information about parents, children, siblings and cousins. Basically your family.
Insurance company - "We've found that your family has a higher risk of kidney disease. In the interest of sharing the risk we won't offer insurance for dialysis or kidney transplant".
I just hope they make the effort to educate people about the pro's and con's of making your dna public.
For less than $200 and a cheek-swiped cotton swab, you will soon be able to add DNA results to family tree Web sites.
Excellent, now the last thing left is for someone to invent a practical cloning machine.
For less than $200 of course.
Anyone got a bittorent to Pamela Anderson's DNA?
Genetic traits can be a better pointer to which region a family came from than simple DNA. After all, DNA takes all that combination stuff (I think it's called sex) and has many latent traits that may or may not show up depending on genetics of both parents.
For example part of my family is Swiss, about six generations back. Part of my wife's family is also Swiss, about four generations back. Her family happens to be from the part of Switzerland that has a wierd abnormality in a small percentage of their population. Sometimes their adult teeth don't develop. Because of this trait and research my wife was able to trace her family to an exact village.
Oh, and no ones privacy was ever in danger.
DNA on the other hand is still latereal in time and not verticle. Unless you want to test a corpse you can't go back many generations. A good tool to see what uncle Joe REALLY did on those "sales" trips in Vegas, but not much good as a family history research tool.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Nuff said.
[Pruneau
Because they offer something valuable in return? Most people like, and are willing to pay for this service. Amateur (and professional) genealogists have been scouring court records for decades trying to find this info. I know that it would be worth $200 to show this kind of info at my family reunion.
/. info the reason the LDS run genealogy organizations is because they teach that if you convert all your ancestors will be saved - that and it might have something to do with money...)
Just because you don't find the service valuable doesn't mean the premise is creepy or silly, and having an organization maintain such a database is a requirement for such a service to function. Besides, maybe you'll get lucky and one of you progeny will convert to LDS and you'll make it into their version of heaven (for general
Besides, isn't it slashdot that usually bemoans holding technology back based on preconceived or anachronistic notions about the way things should be?
Is a website the best place to discover that your DNA doesn't match any of your close relatives, as you were expecting it to - that your parents are not your natural parents and you were adopted?
Unfortunately, there are many cases of people not being told that they were adopted and a web site like this is not the ideal way to discover this. You really need an organization that has some form of immediate support for people who receive unexpected surprises.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
(their dirty little secret for how they put more names in the Book of Mormon)
And why would this matter to you any more than having your name in the phone book, the tax rolls,
the DMV?
Ancestry.com isn't run by the Church. You're thinking of familysearch.com
I am wracking my brain to figure out what it means to have 24,000 searchable databases. I guess all your databases are belong to Ancestry.com.
I'm also curious as to why Lawbean would just post the text of an Associated Press article/press release without attribution or commentary. They certainly leave the impression that they're endorsing the service.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
Getting a warrant for your ancestry DNA file or for a swab of your mouth is the same thing.
The idea is actually very appealing to me. The only problem is the high price of the service and the difficulty of it. Very few around the world will sign up , so few that I predict it will be useless for a long, long time.
The LDS Church doesn't run Ancestry.com. It runs FamilySearch.org.
And no, that has nothing to do with "put[ting] more names in the Book of Mormon". In fact, while Baptism for the Dead is mentioned in the Bible (1 Corinthians 15:29), it isn't mentioned at all in the Book of Mormon.
I know that it would be worth $200 to show this kind of info at my family reunion.
..."
".. and now to Uncle Patrick, who will be pleased to know that he isn't his father's son. Indeed with further investigation I found out that the real father is of Russian descent! I find this amusing given his tight ties in the local Irish community
Yeah, it'd be a right scream.
If a policeman finds 10 DNA samples at a crime scene and 5 can be identified, he'll investigate the 5 he can identify and go after the 1 that he can make the best case against.
It's like searching police records of known criminals for a match, only now he's searching people who had a passport renewed recently.
So go ahead, be an early adopter and get your DNA sample in that database.
If the government has its way, we will *all* be criminals at some point. Even if they have to look at retroactive actions.
Also, don't forget that future employers/insurance carriers might be looking too. "hmmmm we see here you are predisposed to being/having/doing xyz, we don't feel you are good candidate"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Fell out of a tree?
Landed in a volcano in a spaceship that looked like a DC3?
Descendants of the arc?
There are so many stories. Pick one. No, pick two, keep it interesting.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Luke, I am your father.
That's IMPOSSIBLE!
No, really. Check out this link.
NOOOOOOO!!!!!
A married couple went to the hospital to have their baby delivered. Upon their arrival, the doctor said he had invented a new machine that would transfer a portion of the mother's labor pain to the father. He asked if
they were willing to try it out. They were both very much in favor of it. The doctor set the pain transfer to 10% for starters, explaining that even 10% was probably more pain than the father had ever experienced before.
But as the labor progressed, the husband felt fine and asked the doctor to go ahead and bump it up a notch. The doctor then adjusted the machine to 20% pain transfer. The husband was still feeling fine. The doctor checked
the husband's blood pressure and was amazed at how well he was doing. At this point they decided to try for 50%. The husband continued to feel quite well. Since the pain transfer was obviously helping out the wife considerably, the husband encouraged the doctor to transfer ALL the pain to him. The wife deliverer a healthy baby with virtually no pain. She and her husband were ecstatic.
When they got home, the mailman was dead on the porch.
Since its fat gravy train is going to end soon... How? With the massive FREE release of the entire scanned archive from the Mormon Vault in Salt Lake City (to be available on www.familysearch.org). Once this project has gone live much of the information that Ancestry.com currently charges for will be essentially public domain.
There already is a schism forming between Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org, seen from the collapse of arrangements between the Mormon church and Ancestry to provide the Ancestry.com service free in the LDS Family History centers around the world.
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of life
... If you are lucky, you will find out they really aren't your relatives after all, and that your parents kidnapped you from your real parents, who are super mega rich.
Unfortunately, I look so much like my parents, I don't have much hope...
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
My wife and I are trying to have a baby... only our mail carrier is female.... I don't have any backup!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It says my dad is Sylar ..
If I had the spare cash, I'd take a swab from a slab of lunch meat and send that in. Or my cat.
Could that be a way to easily obtain DNA tests when you're in a country in which it's a tough thing to get (like France, for example)?
You just got troll'd!
Ancestry.com is a for profit company.
You are thinking of www.familysearch.org which is a free site run by the LDS.
However, that does not change the fact that they are and have for some time been involved in the process of puttin' dead folks on their register, doesn't make much sense to me but .... http://www.jefflindsay.com/LDSFAQ/FQ_BaptDead.shtm l
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
But I still would never put my DNA on file with anyone, much less pay for it.
More power to those who will try this out, though, you're far less paranoid than I am!
FFS! Rather than moderate the /dribble about DNA forensic testing as OT, I'll contribute.
This is a valuable service (yes there are others available) that tests certain parts of the mitachondrial DNA to establish your maternal lineage and tests certain parts of the Y chromosome (I make the assumption that 98% of the readers are male) to establish your paternal lineage.
If you want to educate yourself on one of the benefits, please take a few hours to learn how this technique has provided amazing details of the 165k yr journey of mankind to populate the planet http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
We had cases come up in our clinic where DNA results didn't match the clinical situation. I tried to find some data on how common this was. I couldn't find any decent data in humans. For birds there is some information. That is where the 5-10% comes from. From the results in our clinic I would say that about 1% of fathers are raising a kid they don't know isn't their's. Even in those cases it wasn't a big shocker to the clinic staff. It didn't take much prompting for the mother to say something like "I guess it could be my ex-boyfriend's".
Now if we could just find Jesus' DNA, everyone with a messiah complex could easily test themselves for godhood!
My family has tried out this exact kind of thing to work on our genealogy. My dad had figured it out all the way back to about 1750, but due to the poor quality of records he had made a few assumptions.
Then on some genealogy website he found someone else compiling data on the same ancestor. I'm not quite sure how he found these people, but he did. Our families should have been related, and the genetics proved it.
I'm told the test mostly relied on Y-chromosome mapping, since that is largely conserved down the male decedents (but I'm no geneticist, so don't trust me too much). Since there was a near perfect match, we now feel certain that the family tree is complete to the mid 18th century.
Simple, and as far as I can tell no giant invasion of privacy.
Now I'm going to be flooded by friends inviting me to join CheekBook, Myface, Snotspot and Smilejournal.
Just for the record: Paul is just mentioning the fact that a group from Corinth is baptizing for the dead, he (neither the Bible) is endorsing it.
Seriously, why are so many people obsessed with family history? It's the same sort of "my ancestors are part of me" bullshit that leads to never-enslaving whites apologising to never-enslaved blacks for something that happened centuries ago.
Guess what? It doesn't matter whether great-great-granddaddy was an Earl, or whether you have a third cousin living in Kuala Lumpur. It is of no consequence, except to satisfy some tedious selfish gene urge. You and your bloodline are not inherently superior or interesting, so if you're feeling lonely, how about getting to know the guy living opposite you, or the girl you see every morning on the train to work? As someone living in a small village, it's sad for me to the city as somewhere people are never alone, but always lonely.
Studies have generated a range of rates of "non-paternity events". There's an article with more details in this month's The Atlantic (subscription required):
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/paternity
From the article:
"When geneticists do large-scale studies of populations, they sometimes can't help but learn about the paternity of the research subjects. They rarely publish their findings, but the numbers are common knowledge within the genetics community. In graduate school, genetics students typically are taught that 5 to 15 percent of the men on birth certificates are not the biological fathers of their children. In other words, as many as one of every seven men who proudly carry their newborn children out of a hospital could be a cuckold."
"Non-paternity rates appear to be substantially lower in some populations. The Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, which is based in Salt Lake City, now has a genetic and genealogical database covering almost 100,000 volunteers, with an overrepresentation of people interested in genealogy. The non-paternity rate for a representative sample of its father-son pairs is less than 2 percent. But other reputed non-paternity rates are higher than the canonical numbers. One unpublished study of blood groups in a town in southeastern England indicated that 30 percent of the town's husbands could not have been the biological fathers of their children."
familytreedna.com does a better job anyway. the ancestry.com deal is all about Sorenson who ones Relative Genetics making a deal with ancestry.com to which he is a principal shareholder. the excitement overwhelms me.
Why? Well from 5% to 20% of children are not fathered by the people who think they did, depending on social stratum.
It'll open up a second family tree, your geneological tree as opposed to your familial tree.
Deleted
Your DNA is not public, just the markers. When your DNA is profiled they will use a set number of markers (anywhere between 12 and 44) to determine your halpogroups (where your DNA originated from) and place you into a combination of groups. It is these markers that become public. Generally the testing sites will destroy your DNA after 6 months; it is kept this long incase you want to have other tests done like y-chromosome, mitochondrial, etc.
Chances are the testing is being contracted out to another organization like The DNA Testing Center of America or another large DNA testing lab at which the DNA retention policies would be that of the lab.
Nihilism means nothing to the dancing peasants
> For less than $200 and a cheek-swiped cotton swab, you will soon be able to add DNA results to family tree Web sites.
And for an additional fee of $10,000 you will get a proof that your political opponent is a bastard
Are you kidding? Criminals are stupid -- particularly violent criminals. The vast majority of violent crime is not committed by chillingly brilliant Hannibal Lector types. It's mostly committed by anti-social dumbasses.
Plus, I've noticed that it's my more redneck relatives that are interested in genealogy to begin with. To me, there's a perfect overlap here. My concern is that if I submitted something to this site, I might show up as the closest match to some cousin of mine who went off and did something stupid while drunk.
I'm just saying there's a lot of monkeys hanging off the other branches of my family tree -- and they fling poop a lot.
...of the mid 90s when my friend was surfing the net and asked me what my SSN was.
Me: "Why do you want to know that?"
Him: "There's this website that will tell you who had your SSN before you did."
Me: "There's no way in HELL I'm giving you my SSN to put on a random website."
But I'm sure plenty of sheeple DID give their SSNs to that site and that plenty will give up their DNA to this website/business. Some things never change.
Getting a warrant for your ancestry DNA file or for a swab of your mouth is the same thing.
Really? I wasn't aware that the FBI could send a National Security Letter to my mouth to check my DNA records and compel my cheek to never inform me of the fact.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Its run by "LDS Entrepeneurs".. same dif.
They tried to baptize my grandmother after she died, and they took over my G-mother in laws funeral after she converted very late in her life. It's not about the religion, its about the people and how they treat people.
Mark it troll-ish all you want, its my opinion and my karma can take it.
http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/63677
My Babylon
I can see it now, I enter in my DNA and they come back showing that my Wife is my 3rd or 4th cousin...
NIGHTMARE!
They're going to piss off their target audience (LDS) when it becomes evident to the users that Native Americans are of Asian not Hebrew descent.
I did some genetics research -early stuff on the genome project. When I first started, some results didn't make sense, and my boss said- "Oh, that's the milkman gene"
I tried to remember what that gene did, until I figured out what he meant.
Do you really want to find out that Dad isn't your father?
..........FULL STOP.
Reminds me of one of the Coffee and Cigarettes vignette where Alfred Molina traces his ancestary roots back to Steve Coogan to find out their cousins by a similar Great Great Great Grandfather. Who cares that much really?!
It turns out that on my father's side I'm related to Adam, and on my mother's side to a monkey.
The NG Project won't net you immediate relatives but show your oldest roots.
Oh, I can only imagine the mischief this will potentially cause... as people discover, not just ancestors they didn't know they had, but ancestors they thought they had, but don't.
"So the years went by and he wished he was dead. He had seventeen girls and still wasn't wed.
When he'd ask his papa, papa would always say, 'No! That girl is your sister but your mama don't know!'
"So he went to his mama and he bowed his head. Told his mama what his papa had said.
His mama said, 'Son, go, man, go! Your papa ain't your papa but your papa don't know!'"
--"Ah Woe, Ah Me," Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, John Stewart, popularized by the Kingston Trio
"She's the illegitimate daughter, of the illegitimate son, of the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon."
--Ira Gershwin, _Of Thee I Sing+
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
that could tell me what predispositions I have to certain diseases.
The time is not far away when hospitals will routinely take a DNA sample from every newborn to test for genetic defects, and to file away as part of its lifelong medical records. Doctors will also routinely map a patient's DNA to test for genetic defects and predisposition to a myriad of conditions and diseases; to not do so will be considered malpractice.
These records will be made available to the government under whatever law prevails at that time. Under current law, the FBI only has to declare someone a 'person of interest' in the name of national security and the records must be handed over without a warrant. If that's okay with you, then do nothing. If it's not, then elect legislators and a president who will restore our basic freedoms.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
The most extreme test available (67 Y-chromosome markers + deep subclade + Kittler DYS385, 25 autosomnal DNA markers, 16 X-chromosome markers and complete mapping of the mitochondrial DNA + identification of sub-sub-branch), assuming the DNA was from a male, would be good enough to identify a person and all their male siblings. It's no better than that. And, frankly, these tests aren't cheap and unless you were adopted from a fairly high-tech country, no sane person would ever get this level of testing. They'd have the family tree back some number of generations and would not bother testing more accurately than needed to examine the next few generations out.
The other thing to consider is that these are not supervised tests. Anyone can send in DNA from anyone else under any name at all, and the lab would have no way of knowing. It makes no difference to the person getting the test done, because all lookups from there-on-out are all done by reference number or by the name of the most ancient ancestor known, not by the living person's name.
From a law-enforcement perspective, it might eliminate some possibilities, but I can't see it being useful in positive identification.
Now, there IS one area of concern for me. Some DNA labs do retain additional DNA samples for retesting or upgrades from previous tests. This is raw DNA material and could potentially be accessed by the wrong person. Usually, there is some protection (the vials are only marked with a serial number, not a name), but law enforcement could potentially gain access to the database that links name to number. That could be a problem.
Beyond that, though, this really does only have use for genealogists, historians and anthropologists. The data is just too vague for anyone else.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's interesting, because the way I read it it sounds to me like more than a mention--He's using it as support for doctrine he's teaching. Why would Paul use something that they're doing that is doctrinally deviant as support for something that he is teaching as truth? It seems to me that he would at least mention--in his letter that is already intended as correction--that they shouldn't be baptizing for the dead.
It's hard to call it a "secret." Here is a page I got to from lds.org > About the Church > Glossary > B > Baptism for the Dead
There already exist some example of very fast "un-perfect" matching engines for sequences of numbers. One of them for example is BLAST, a tool used to search DNA sequence in huge databases containing most of the known and decoded genomes plus some additionnal DNA sequences, or to search sequence of amino-acids in databses of proteins and peptides. Has search modes for approximative match. Could be ported to use a numeric sequence representing the DNA fingerprint instead of DNA/peptide sequences.
/tell apart/ as much people as possible, but to cluster them into groups. Thus the requirement for avoiding false matches aren't met because the whole point is to find which people actually are related. Therefore, if you try to use it for forensic purpose, you may end up with way too much noise, and get whole clusters of loosely related people as answers for matching request. ...unless by then, the laws in security-crazy countries like USA and such changes, and It suddenly perfectly normal to send a whole such cluster of several hundreds (or thousand) of people to Guanatamo Bay for... further "processing and selection"... just to be on the safe side in case the current target terror-pedo-pirate criminal may be related to them, you think of the children, you freedom hater !
Probably used by the actual genealogical search.
The only problem : standarise the procedure on a specific set of DNA fingerprint markers that :
- is the same across all labs (because if police labs don't detect the same information they just can't compare against the database)
- relies on a sufficiently high number of marker to have a low enough false positive to be usable. Currently most forensic DNA fingerprinting are built around the idea to be able to tell apart between a few suspect. When you have one-a-billion practical risk of collision, in can be enough to tell apart inside a small group of suspect, specially when you combine with other informations. When you have one-a-billion practical risk of collision and use it to search the whole human population you have at least a dozen of positive suspects, probably even more, because the actual practical risk may even be higher.
You'll therefore need a test whose discriminating power is much higher than the number of people in the database. And that can be performed VERY reliably on very bad quality sample. You are not only comparing nice swabs, but also you may need to identify a badly burned corpse after a plane crash or a small droplet of blood on a crime scene, where you don't have the luxury to have a lot of raw material preserved under optimal conditions.
And that's very un-likely to happen because :
- this is a difficult procedure to setup and standardise across al forensic labs.
- you are actually searching a database whose purpose isn't to
Which will give more unnecessary work than help to the investigators.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Wait for it...
"Why is the line to my father dotted?"
"Uhh, the computer does it after linking your DNA. Apparently he's not your actual father."
"WHAT?!?!?"
"Yes. Apparently your real father is Franklin O'Tool, a retired mail carrier now in Hawaii."
"Ohhhh my god. Ahhh, what is a 'real father', anyway?"
"Apparently, it's a mail carrier."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Why the obsession with people genetically similar to us? Isn't it enjoyable enough to meet and get to know people without the specious idea that they're more connected if they share a few genes?
nt
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
Send in dog slobber as yours.
Someone hates these cans.
The only data more private than my DNA is my thoughts. I can't see why I would publish it.
I know that I leave DNA traces wherever I touch, and in an invisible cloud wherever I am. But sampling DNA expected to be private from public residue is at least debatable. Voluntarily publishing my complete genome, connected to my family data, seems worse than leaving my housekey hanging outside my door, or my bank PIN written on my local ATM.
--
make install -not war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
There is nothing that can be done about the past.
Paul is making a strawman argument... he is saying that baptism is in vain if Christ is still dead.
In the previous paragraph he discusses that all things are under Christ's authority. Then the v.29 paragraph begins with the quote, basically saying that believers baptize on behalf of the alive Christ who was raised, who still rules and will rule. Just a verse later he points out the foolishness of this belief if Christ wasn't raised/isn't alive, "If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'"
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
But who owns it? Are you the owner of it or does the web site take ownership? What if I have a gene for shiny hair and somebody wants to copy it someday? Just wondering.....who will get the royalties?
... at YSearch.
The testing only involves certain standard alleles of mostly unknown function on the Y-chromosome, picked for their mix of mutation rate. By comparing the results with that of someone you suspect is related, you can get a good idea whether you are in fact related, or how closely. It's far from being enough information to identify you personally, so privacy concerns are minimal. Your first cousin might match you 67 out of 67 markers, while you 5th cousin will probably only match the 37 more slowly mutating markers.
Of course, this kind of testing can lead to the exposure of deep dark secrets regarding parentage. If that would bother you a lot, you probably shouldn't be doing genealogy.
Ancestry.com is apparently now going to compete with FTDNA, which is the most widely used and respected genealogical DNA testing company.
Anybody who has ever tried to do genealogical lookups on the Internet soon learns to hate ancestry.com -- until you give in and pay their $155 per year.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Save a hundred bucks! We all have earliest ancestors from Africa. Apparently one small tribe of ppl is the source of all human DNA today.
n/t
Incidentally, subscription NOT required if your sueragent identifies as Google.
Knowing where one's forebearers had come and proving it may be a matter of life and death. Most may claim that this is merely academic. That may be true in a nation that is based on individual rights. However, what if something really nasty were to happen to the USA and people started to look elsewhere to live (ARGENTINA, ANYONE?). Suddenly, family records become IMPORTANT. Many nations have tightened up their requirments for their respective laws of return AND laws of entry. In many instances, a batchelor's degree has become just as important as a passport and family records for returning to a land of one's ancestors (well-educated people earn lots of money so they can pay lots of taxes to support their social insurance system).
Not all laws of return are indefinite. Israel's Law of Return is set to expire in 2023. That gives everyone with a Jewish mother or a convert to Judaism sixteen years to make up their mind whether to risk persecution and slaughter in the diaspora (YES I INCLUDE THE USA IN THIS) or get themselves where they really belong. Money and assimilation may be one's G-d, but that does not unmake one a Jew in the eyes of judeopaths; it only reinforces that stereotype that feeds judeopathy. For the one who can prove one Jewish grandparent, one has to 'make aliyah' from within Israel (i.e. visit on a visa that permits this sort of procedure). This is because in the USA and Canada, one must process throught the Jewish Agency for Israel, which uses the halachic position that a child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is not recognized as Jewish (still makes just as good a lampshade as the others). There exists the "Shalit Amendment" in the Law of Return that permits one who has one Jewish grandparent the right of return, This was based on the Nurenberg Race Laws: 'Jew enough to gas and burn, Jew enough for the Law of Return' (my quote).
Last epsisode: Underground rebellion
Coming episode: Red cow & copper snake
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.