Today's another day of fact or fiction. Where I'm gonna go through a statement that somebody
has made or a question that somebody has asked and quickly just answer how that is fact or fiction.
Howdy, welcome to Family History Fanatics, where we love helping you climb your family tree
and have fun along the way. If you're new to genetic genealogy, chances are you have tons of
questions. Be sure to check out the link in the description below for our free guide to the 5
most common DNA questions that we have answers to. Today's fact or fiction is: DNA tests can identify
a specific location where your ancestors live. And this is probably one that is what gets most people
into DNA testing. They see the commercials about finding out what your heritage is,
your ethnicity, what groups you belong to, or at least your ancestors belong to.
And that's really, I think, where the majority of people start with the DNA testing. So
let's get down to DNA tests whether DNA tests can identify specific locations your ancestors
have lived. Now various companies make claims as to how accurate they are. Just in general, I'm
going to say that this is fiction sort of because it depends on where or how specific of a location
we're talking about. If we're talking about a specific continent, well, I'm going to have to
agree because there's actually enough difference that we see between Europeans and Asians and
Americans and Africans that we can identify a DNA profile for those different continents. Now that
doesn't mean that everybody from that continent has that DNA profile. It just means that hey,
there's certain markers that are far more prevalent in that place than another place.
But then we get down to smaller and smaller levels. And this is really what people are
wanting is hey what which of the African tribes am I from or what country in Europe were my ancestors
from or you know anything like this. And that's where it gets to be a little bit more problematic.
Two reasons. Well, two big reasons there's probably lots of reasons.
The first one is we are using modern DNA. In other words, yours to compare to other people who are
also modern. In other words, the reference sets that they use to define what is Northwest European
DNA what is East African DNA. Those DNA sets are all from people who live there now. Now one of
the criteria for those reference sets is that their grandparents also had to have lived there
sometimes. Their great-grandparents. All of their great-grandparents had to have lived there. And so
we can reliably go back two or three generations and say, okay yeah, this looks like that.
What we're not comparing to is we're not comparing to a few hundred years ago DNA.
For instance, I have a line of ancestors that are Dutch Northwest European,
and they have been in America since the 1600s. Basically, when the Dutch first settled in New
Amsterdam and up to Fort Orange, they were part of that 300 years ago. My Dutch ancestors were not
from the Netherlands. They were from America. It wasn't until four or five hundred years
ago that they were from the Netherlands. So comparing my DNA. Now with their DNA,
we would see that hey, this DNA looks like it's from the Americas, and that's why companies
really take out all these these colonial nations like the United States, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand. Except for the native populations because just in a few hundred years of
colonialism, we've had large groups of people that really have completely changed the DNA profile
of an area. We're not comparing our modern DNA to, I don't want to say, postmodern or ancient DNA,
but older DNA. We're comparing it to modern DNA as far as a reference set, and because of their known
genealogy histories, that gets us back about 100 years. But that's where the second problem comes
in is the amount of migration that has happened in the human family over the centuries. Now I
mentioned this because when we're talking about my Dutch ancestors. The main surname that ends
up connecting with me is Quick. Quick is actually not a Dutch surname. It is an English surname. And
back, I believe in the 1500s, you know when there was a major war or there's lots of wars in Europe
at that time, but there was plenty of English soldiers that were stationed, fighting, whatever,
over in the continental part of Europe. And some of them stayed, and that is probably where
this Quick surname for the Dutch came from is actually from English. But if we go back further,
of course, we find different surnames. We have the Norman invasion into England. We have earlier
with the Angles and the Saxons invasion the Viking invasion. So that's just what we know on a broad
scale. Just in Europe, we have these groups moving all over. So is it unusual to find, let's say,
Scandinavian DNA in France? well, no, because we know that the Vikings, you know, invaded France.
We certainly find it in England and in Ireland, but likewise, we also find English DNA in other
parts of Europe. We find Italian DNA elsewhere. Now that doesn't mean that everybody in those
groups all has that, but it's not unusual to find something like that. That your ancestors were from
that place maybe at some point, but they were also from a lot of other places. And so pinpointing
specific locations, I don't put much weight in that basically because we really don't know what
the DNA profile of the people that lived there 500 years ago was. We don't know what it was 1,000
years ago. We can assume that it's very similar to the ones that live there now that have had their
great-grandparents. But if you imagine, hey, if your great-grandparents were all born there, but
their parents were immigrants from somewhere else well. Now you've got a different DNA that has been
put into that group. And so now you're classifying something as English DNA when really it should
be classified as Dutch DNA or Polish DNA or Scandinavian DNA. So there's a lot of
complications in that, and that's why I think that this is a fiction. I don't think this is a fact.
I don't put a lot of weight in companies that are saying they can pinpoint a specific location
of where your DNA is from because I don't think that we have the amount of data or even the
type of data that we need to make that conclusion. If you want to learn more about DNA, why don't
you try looking at this video up here, But if you want to learn something about researching
a particular record set, then why don't you try this video down below.