Roger Tanner Ancestry

This posting is for my Uncle Roger Tanner. We recently tested his DNA at 23andMe. I will be sending this link to family and friends interested in the results of his test. I will also send this link to people that are looking for Native American ancestry to show what you can do with your data when the more conservative projects fail to show this.I will update this page in the future as I get more information from my research.

Roger's family on both sides is very Colonial and for the last few hundred years, very Southern. The family is from Georgia and Florida most recently but we have family from Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennesee. So any family connections in the Southeast are possible. The paternal Tanner side of the family is mostly from Washington County Ga. and surnames of interest are Tanner, Tompkins, Scott, and Sheppard. Roger's maternal side of the family is more of a mystery and we are working on that documentation now. Surnames of interest are Brady, Phillips, Bryant, Bryan, Dove, Smith, Mansell, and Mathis.


What have we done with Roger's DNA?

We have sent his data to Dr. Doug McDonald and David Wesolowski who runs the Eurogenes Genetic Ancestry Project We have submitted his Y-Chromosome information to Adriano Squecco and David F Reynolds' Y-Chromosome Genome Comparison project . Roger is also in Leon Kull's HIR Search.

If you have any questions or match him at HIR Search or 23andMe, feel free to email me with any questions. You can find my email in the "about me" link on the right side of this page.



Here is some Ancestral information for my Uncle Roger Tanner.

23andMe Global Similarity

23andMe Ancestry Painting

Here is a high level "painting" of Roger's chromosomes.

23andMe Ancestry Finder

23andMe decribes the tool by saying "Let the 23andMe Community help you discover what countries your ancestors might have lived in. This lab is fueled by your responses to the "Where Are You From?" ancestry survey."

So above are the results from 23andMe. 23andme tends to be rather conservative so I submitted his DNA to a few cutting edge projects.

Dr. Doug McDonald

Dr. McDonald had just gotten his V3 program working but was able to provide these comments:

"He has a 25 mb segment of Native American on Chromosome 18 and a 5 mb one on
chromosome 14. More to follow. There is also a teensy bit of African. Rest Euro. -Doug"

So we can see that with a higher resolution tool Dr. Mcdonald was able to find more Amerindian than 23andMe reported.



 

David Wesolowski

Next I sent his data to the Eurogenes Project for analysis. David replied with this:

  "Your uncle (US184) does show some Native American, with small, tight hits on chromosomes 4 and 6, and larger but sparser hits on chromosomes 11 and 18. I assume it's one of the larger Amerindian hits that got picked up at 23andMe as "Asian". The chromosome 11 and 18 SNPs that weren't flagged in this analysis, that sit in-between those that were, do pull your uncle some way towards my North Amerindian samples.
  
   However, he also shows very clear signals of Sub-Saharan African ancestry on chromosomes 2 and 4. They're quite unmistakable, and I have a hunch that they come from the same ancestor as the Amerindian hits, but that's just speculation." -David

Roberta Estes has written extensively on Native American and Melungeon ancestry. Here are a few links to a few of her articles for further reading.

http://www.jogg.info/52/files/Estes1.pdf

http://www.jogg.info/62/files/Estes.pdf

23andMe V3 Chip Ancestry

23andMe provides many ways to figure out your ancestry. Here are a few of the tools they provide using my results as an example. This data is from the new V3 chip.


Global Similarity

Here is my "Global Similarity" provided by 23andMe.  I'm closet to English, French, German, and Norwegian. I've included screen shots of each level of detail. I'm the red bar and then I'm the green dot as it gets more detailed.

Ancestry Painting

Here is a high level "painting" of my chromosomes. They only use three populations in this tool and it's pretty conservative. My results were 100% Europe.

Ancestry Finder

Ancestry Finder allows you to see where some of the people that match your chromosomes are from. Of course you have to complete the survey to have your data included, and many have not done this or any of the surveys. Since 23andMe have a large user base in the United States, many of my matches are here. Next highest are Ireland then the United Kingdom. This isn't surprising to me considering my known genealogy.

23andMe decribes the tool by saying "Let the 23andMe Community help you discover what countries your ancestors might have lived in. This lab is fueled by your responses to the "Where Are You From?" ancestry survey."

Digging Deeper

I also sent my data to Dr. Doug McDonald who analyzed my Family Finder data last year. Dr. McDonald uses a higher resolution process so you can find things that the 23andMe tool might miss. I have a little American Indian, some African, and some South Asian. These could all just be ancestral pieces of DNA that exsist in the general population.

Dr. McDonald : The "spot on the map" is in France, near Charleville-Mezieres

So even if you are adopted or know very little about your ancestry, these new tools can give you a lot of insight into who you are genetically.  I posted last year about my Family Finder results from FTDNA here: FTDNA Biogeographical Ancestry

Elizabeth Claire Eaves

This post is for 23andMe matches for my wife Elizabeth Claire Eaves. Her mother was born in Germany and her maternal side is German. Her father was born in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky and is very Colonial. My name is William B Allen and I manage her account. My email address is salabencher@gmail.com . I am very interested in genealogy and DNA and am quite active on the various DNA mail lists/blogs. Feel free to email me any time.

From 23andme we have the following reports for Elizabeth:



Elizabeth's Global Similarity

Her Ancestry Finder so far

What we know of her father's genealogy

What we know of her mother's genealogy

Results from Dr McDonald

Dr. McDonald uses a higher resolution process that seems to find things that the 23andMe tool might miss.

"You test 90% Orcadian, the rest somewhere in the Mideast. The spot on the map

is in Belgium. Since there is no sign of significant recent mixing, all western Europe, but not all northern Britain, is most likely. - Doug McDonald"

Spot on the map