Extended Family

Early last year, as some of you may remember, my friends Tracy and Stanley bought me a DNA testing kit from Family Tree DNA. Simple kit, you swab your cheek three times, stick the tubes in the mail and wait a few months. Their wonderful gift allowed me to trace my Y-DNA, my paternal line and my mitochondrial DNA or maternal line. I made some remarkable discoveries with this information. So you know, Tracy is sister to Lynne, one of my oldest friends and Leslie and I share a very warm relationship with both Tracy and her husband, an attorney.

The science has advanced in the last year. The new Family Finder™ tests autosomal DNA blocks at 710,000 pairs of location points on your 22 autosomal chromosomes. This new test allows you to positively match another person as a relative to five generations.

I got an email from Tracy last night asking me if I had seen the results that finally came in last night. I was in for a surprise!

It turns out that Stanley is my closest relative on Family Finder™. Out of hundreds of thousands of people in the database, the guy who helped buy me the test and who I spend New Years Eve with most years is my closest genetic counterpart. What are the odds of that? There are currently 335,475 samples in the database. This represents 39,758 unique twelve marker haplotypes, 77,177 unique twenty-five marker haplotypes, and 91,590 unique thirty-seven marker haplotypes. Of course this is a new test and there will be more and closer matches down the road but this is still extraordinary, especially since we don't share the same paternal haplogroup. I am an E1b1b1c1* - d1 with origins 22,400 years ago in Somalia and Stanley comes from an Aaronic or priestly southern african line. K on the mt-dna side.We share a similar diastoma.

Stanley and I have the longest shared block (dna segment) out of the 418 new cousins I have just en-covered. These blocks prove that we are identical by descent (ibd).

I have also discovered that I am a 100% purebred middle eastern jew. Forget the Khazar stuff.

The population finder compares autosomal DNA to the world population database. It is not uncommon to share your origin with several of the seven continental population groups.

My ancestors apparently never sowed their seed outside of the fold or tribe.


I am excited about this new information. It also might explain why I have always felt so close to Stanley but then again I feel close to Tracy as well to and as far as I know we do not have a shared genetic heritage. I have emailed my close Y-DNA matches and suggested that they too take this new test. I noticed that there is a female Belinkoff on my list and that is the name of one of my closest Y-DNA matches and one of my father's oldest friends.

The test also allows me to compare individual DNA segments with my matches. I include Stanley and four other new cousins in this graph to illustrate:

I am very happy to get the new information from this test. I am still awaiting my Y-DNA upgrade to 67 markers. I am so far an identical match to the one doctor in Seattle at 37 alleles. Will be interesting to see if the match holds up throughout the new alleles.

My brother Buzz wonders why I care. He says he can't stand most of the family he does know, why find more? It's a good question but I continue on my quest to deduce the genetic past. And I want to buy my new cousin Stanley a drink.