DNA – Beeshive

To clear up some things about my DNA results, because I was directed to a CBC program by my brother.

I wasn’t aware that so many people don’t understand DNA and what the DNA results mean.

The first thing that needs to be made clear is that all of the DNA testing available on the consumer market is only as reliable as the sample pools.

My DNA results state that 15% of my DNA is shared in common with indigenous communities in North America. All this means that that 15% of my DNA is shared in common with those who have submitted DNA tests to Ancestry and who have self identified as indigenous. Due to the small sample sizes Ancestry will not be able to tell me which nation my DNA is derived from. To do that Ancestry would need a much more detailed pool to pull from.

This also why even though my father and his father identified as Irish, I only share about 3% of my DNA with persons who identify with being solely Irish.

This is where things get really murky with DNA results from England and Northern Europe. England will include a massive amount of Irish. Same thing with the Scottish. As England was conquered numerous times over the ages, and as England conquered its neighbours numerous times over the years it’s pretty easy to understand that there would have been migrations and marriages between the people of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, along with the Republic of Ireland.

Again, unless everyone alive in the UK and the Republic of Ireland took a DNA test you’re not going to be able to pinpoint my ancestry down to a specific village or a specific county.

My DNA results will not explain why I like to wear dresses or why I don’t identify as a male. There just simply isn’t enough DNA sampling coupled with clinical research. And DNA will never explain societal norms such as boys wear pants, girls wear dresses, pink is for girls, blue is for boys. And this is because societal norms are learnt behaviour, they’re not encoded in your DNA.

For instance up until the 1930s, pink was the boys colour as it was seen as being the diminutive of red and red of course was seen as being a man’s colour. Blue was for girls as it was seen as being dainty and delicate. Why it changed? Who know. But it changed around the 1930s and it seemed that it was large American retailers that decided that in American pink was for girls and blue was for boys.

Dresses for boys? Even in America as late as the early 1900s it wasn’t uncommon for boys to wear dresses until they were breached around age 7 or 8. Even historically in England boys wore dresses. There are portraits of English nobility and for the longest time researchers couldn’t figure out why the boys were never in the paintings, why it was always the girls. Not too long ago historians finally realized that some of these “girls” were actually boys. And that the only way to tell the boys from the girls in these portraits is that the dresses worn by boys were plain and the boys weren’t wearing any type of jewellery where as the dresses worn by girls often had patterns or trims and the girls were always wearing bracelets, necklaces, or earrings.

Why aren’t boys in modern media and modern history depicted as wearing dresses or wearing pink? As is the case with war stories, things get cleaned up and adjusted to fit the modern narratives.

What DNA can tell you, but again without 100% certainty, is what type of genetic characteristics you will possibly express.
Are you ambidextrous?
Can you taste certain foods?
Do certain foods taste repulsive to you?
Are you double jointed?
Are you left handed?
Can you digest lactose?

Again, this is only as accurate as the number of samples that these DNA companies receive.

And as far as I know, these DNA companies all steer clear of known genetic markers for disease and disabilities. And this is because you can have markers for MS, or a particular kind of cancer, or for Down syndrome, etc. But just having these markers doesn’t mean that you will develop these issues nor does it mean that you will pass these genetic issues down to your offspring.

So no, DNA testing will never explain why I like dresses, or why I don’t identify as a male.

But what DNA testing will do to a certain extent is let me fill in my family tree.

I’ve already come across numerous connections for every branch of my tree except for the paternal side of my father side. The Gill tree is a complete dead end after Arthur Herman Gill. Maybe someday in the future someone from the Gill side of the family will submit a DNA test that will let me fill in Arthur Herman’s side of the family, but until then I’ve got numerous 2nd or 3rd cousins from the Gill clan in the Durham and Peterborough region of Ontario, but nothing yet that directly ties them to Arthur or his son Richard.

So, I bit the bullet last week and I ordered an Ancestry DNA test.

I’ve always been kinda curious about my lineage.

According to my father, I’m my Uncle Al’s son.

But then again, according to Richard I’m Bill Parker’s son.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what comes back.

There are pictures of my brother and I as kids.

He has the same skin tone and brown eyes like my grandmother.

Me?

I look like my mother, and so does my brother.

But he also looks like he has First Nations blood.

Me, not so much.

My father was a horndog that would literally fuck anything that moved.

I’ll be interested to see if I get any hits for half-brothers and half-sisters that I didn’t know about.

He was with the Royal Canadian Navy for 6 years before he remustered into the airforce after the unification of the Canadian Forces in 1968.

But even when he was with the airforce he was often away on training exercises.

So there’s no telling how many panties he dropped.

And the thing with being in the Canadian Forces back then is when he said that he was going away on training exercises, did he really go away on training exercises?

Or were his “weekend training exercises” just panty raids.

But other than discovering how far and wide my old man distributed his tadpoles, I’m really curious about the maternal side of my family.

As I’ve said previously, I more or less know about the paternal side of my family. My paternal grandmother raised my brother and I for about 6 years of our lives as kids.

I did meet my paternal grandfather, albeit only for a few weeks over the 1982 xmas holidays.

I met both of my paternal uncles, uncle Doug and uncle Norman.

I met two of my paternal grandmother’s brothers, Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Johnny.

I even met my paternal grandmother’s sister, Aunt Karen.

So far as the maternal side of my family, I only vaguely remember uncle Al. I never would see uncle Al again after my father was posted from CFB Shearwater to CFB Summerside.

It will be interesting to see what comes up.