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

One more letter from Grace

Here is one more letter from Grace Tanner to her brother, my grandfather Roger Tanner.

Letter to Roger Tanner from sister Grace

My grandfather Roger Tanner was a WWII vet and typical of many of his peers liked to drink Beer and smoke cigars. Here is a letter from his sister Grace asking him to go to church and find Jesus. You can tell from the letter that she loved Roger very much.  If you click on each picture it will enlarge to original size.

Grocery list from Juanita Tanner

I had scanned numerous letters to and from the Tanner family last year.  On the back of a letter from Grace there is a grocery list that I believe Juanita scribbled. I enjoy seeing these little time capsules from my ancestors.

 

 

Juanita Melviney Tanner

     My maternal grandmother Juanita Melviney Tanner (maiden name Brady or Phillips or another name depending on the day of the week) died on September 18, 2003. I spent quite a bit of time with Grandma Tanner as a young boy and as an adult. When I was little I would spend the night at Grandma's house and she would make me greasy hamburgers on plain white bread (no bun) with a glass of orange Kool-Aid in a huge Tupperware cup. I swear she put a half cup of sugar in each glass and I loved it! My grandparents lived in an old house with very little insulation so at night it would get very cold. She would tuck me into the bed in the guest room and stack five blankets on top of me.

   When I was a teenager I would visit Grandma Juanita and she would tell me stories about the family while we watched Bonanza or Sanford and Son. Juanita was a fun person to talk to and often laughed. She was also very religious and very superstitious. When Grandma Juanita passed away she had been sick for some time so it wasn't a surprise to the family. She was 83 and had lived a full life. I was called from work by my mom the day she was dying and went to her house. She was surrounded by her family when she died the way it should be.

     A few days later we had the viewing at Blount & Curry Funeral Home in Tampa, Florida. My wife Beth is a florist and is very talented. She offered to make the casket spray since these can cost many hundreds of dollars. The family pitched in and gave her money for the flowers. Beth went to the floral wholesaler and picked out several types of flowers such as beautiful white lilies, yellow roses, and dark purple lisianthus that looked like purple velvet.

     Later that day Beth was in our house making the flowers for Grandma's casket, when she looked out the window and saw a hummingbird hovering around, looking in at her. Beth excitedly told me about this when I got home. She said " she felt like the hummingbird was Grandma letting us know that she was free from pain, flying up to Heaven." This was the first time she had ever seen a hummingbird and we didn't have a bird feeder outside at this house.

     Later that night we took the flowers to the funeral home and all of the family was there for the viewing. We were shocked to see that the flowers that Beth had picked out matched Grandma Juanita's dress perfectly even though she had no idea Grandma would be wearing purple and the room she was in was.... The Hummingbird Room! The room was full of pictures of hummingbirds... So was the hummingbird at the window Grandma Juanita from the grave?

OakLawn Cemetery

I visited Oak Lawn Cemetery today with cousin JoNelda. Attached are photos of John Morgan Tanner and Minnie Lee Tanner née Scott's headstones. They are located in separate areas of the cemetery. 

Minnie Lee was located next to her daughter Rose Pearl. Her grave shows her name as Rosa Pearl, Im not sure what is correct. Rose's (Rosa's?) husband was also buried next to Minnie and his wife.

Dodecad Update

Kasandra compiled the Family finder members in the Dodecad project and created a comparison sheet. There are 54 users on this sheet.   I'm FF009    Thanks Kasandra!

Dodecad Ancestry Project

Dienekes' was kind enough to include me in his initial Family Finder run for his Dodecad Ancestry Project. I'm  FFD001  the first bar on the sheet. Most of my results are not a surprise, mostly North European and South European.

Thanks Dienekes'!

Eurogenes New World admixture update

Just in time for Thanksgiving, the Eurogenes project has a new admixture run, my results:

Explanation from Davids site:

"This analysis assumes that the New World (ie. the Americas) is made up of four ancestral groups - Sub-Saharan African, European, North Amerindian and South Amerindian. It ignores the rest of the world. So if your parents or grandparents are from Europe, and yet you score a couple per cent of Amerindian admixture, then clearly, that's not due to Amerindian ancestry, but some other influence taking its form, like North or East Eurasian"

http://bga101.blogspot.com/2010/11/new-world-admixture-results-23andme-and.html

Letter from Missouri Sarah Bryant

Here is a letter from my maternal great grandmother Missouri Sarah Bryant to her daughter Juanita Tanner. Posted to share with family.

Biogeographical Ancestry

   Earlier this year I had my Autosomal DNA scanned by Family Tree DNA. They use this data for various products they offer as well as providing a copy that you can download for yourself. So now that I have a copy of my data that I've been submitting  to numerous biogeographical studies. These studies use the 500,000 pairs of locations (SNPs) to look for ancestral markers. Basically we all carry little markers that give hints to what people or tribe we come from. The old tests were pretty lame using 13-100 CODIS markers to identify your origin. The new tests available today utilize 500,000 + markers within our DNA , a substantial difference.

   Of course you can have your entire Genome scanned by a few companies, but I don't have the extra $20,000 at the moment to do this. The average person is getting their data from FTDNA or 23andMe with the price ranging from $250-$500 US for these tests.

   So we are dealing with 500,000 markers and researchers believe that only 100,000 are necessary to get a good idea "what" you are. My data has been run four times by different researchers. Here are the results:

Test # 1
First I ran my data through Dienekes'
  EURO-DNA-CALC

This program gives you a percentage estimate of your Northwest Euro, Southeast Euro, or Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. I came back 100% Northwest Euro.


[1] "NORTHWEST EURO: Maximum Likelihood Estimate=100% Interval=[71, 100]"
[1] "SOUTHEAST EURO: Maximum Likelihood Estimate=0% Interval=[0, 29]"
[1] "ASHKENAZI JEWISH: Maximum Likelihood Estimate=0% Interval=[0, 22]"

 

Test # 2

Next I submitted my data to the Eurogenes Project.  This project is one of the most exciting ones happening right now along with Dr. McDonald's project. David sends out updates almost weekly as new people join the project and he gives you a percentage breakdown along with numerous maps.

I'm listed as F-US9 and sit between the Orcadian and French samples.

Here's an example of what David provides:

My percentage breakdown from Eurogenes:

Western European 39.23%
Anatolian/Caucasian 4.35%
Middle Eastern 0.5485%
Northeast European 35.72%
Mediterranean 20.13%
North African 0.001%


A run with Native American reference populations for comparison.  I have no Native American DNA according to this test.

Amerindian 0.001%
Anatolian/Caucasian 23.19%
Northeast European 75.63%
North Eurasian 1.14%
East Asian 0.001%

Test # 3
I sent my data to Professor J.Doug McDonald,
 Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research interests include studies of the folding of single protein molecules. He is the Assistant Administrator and Data Custodian of the Clan Donald DNA Project.


Dr. McDonald has been accepting data and running reports for DNA hobbyists like myself for the last few years. Dr. McDonald's analyses of my DNA was as follows:

I can't tell specific European mixtures, only if you fit a pure comparison panel I have, or else I can just give what the "average" is, unless the Euro is one of the oddball ones like Sardinia.

My "spot on the map" puts you in the English Channel between London and Belgium. This implies, of course, that British/French works, and it does. You should take anything other than the average with a very large grain of salt. The average is usually reliable.

I see no Native American using any of the tests I have, which includes one like 23andMe's "Ancestry Painting" but I have real Native American comparisons. This test can IN SOME CASES reliably detect or exclude Native American on the 0.8% scale, and is very reliable at 3%. Dr. McDonald says "In your case, I'd simply say that while I see teeny bit of it purportedly here and there, they are WELL within the noise and are not real."

No test reliably gets individual country fractions accurately inside Europe, mine, or others (except those special cases ...if somebody is 50% Basque 50% Romanian, for example, it will get the Basque quite correct but may say Russian or Lithuanian, not Romanian, etc.)

Doug

Test # 4
Family Tree DNA Population Finder

FTDNA provided the raw data I used in the tests above. Their Population Finder test is still in beta and they tend to be more conservative than the other tests.

My results were:
Europe (Western European) 93.26% ±6.82%
Europe 6.74% ±6.82%

The Population Finder Program determines your biogeographical ancestry — the story of your personal genetic history — by comparing your autosomal DNA to that of our world DNA population database. Your Population Finder results consist of up to four out of seven continental groups.* For each, the percentage of your genome that matches is shown. You may view your results as either a stacked bar or pie chart.


So around 90% of my DNA matches the Western European reference populations which are:

Basque
French
Orcadian
Spanish
 
The other 10% or so of my DNA match the other European populations but not close enough to give a subgroup, so it's put into the generic Europe category.

These are listed below:

Northeast European
Finnish
Russian


Caucasus
Adygei

Southeast European
Romanian

Southern European
Italian
Sardinian
Tuscan
 
Hopefully when the Population Finder product comes out of beta, there will be further refinement.
 
 
So what do I think about my ancestry now that I've had my DNA analysed four different ways? I think I'm mostly Irish, English, and French. Traditional genealogy has pointed to these populations and the DNA tests seem to point in this direction as well. 
 
My family has a strong history of Native American ancestry through my mom's side of the family as well. I believe that this does not exist since I've found no proof genealogically or within my Genome.
 
I'm very grateful for the researchers above that have given their time with these projects. They are filling a needed void in the Biogeographical Ancestry testing field.