He may have seen his mother once before, but PJ Holland can’t be sure. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-19680 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-216x300.jpg 216w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-768x1067.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-737x1024.jpg 737w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-633x880.jpg 633w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-849x1180.jpg 849w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182.jpg 1270w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 216px) 100vw, 216px" /> 
It’s a fleeting memory, one of his first. He would have been two or three at the time. He remembers watching two women crying and hugging each other near his room. He thinks one of the women was his mother. He remembers seeing the two women hold each other, and then they were gone.
So the first time PJ Holland saw his mother’s face, it was in a photograph. It was this August. He was 80.
The old black and white image of his mother had been taken long before his birth and he saw it for the first time only after spending decades looking for her. He, and his niece Marilyn Souders, would never have found his mother if it hadn’t been for 23andMe.
“One day I logged into his account and it said, ‘You have a match,’” said Marilyn, whose family took PJ in when he was 19, and made him one of their own.
“We spent so long looking,” said Marilyn.
PJ’s story came to us from<a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/p/about-me.html"> CeCe Moore</a>. CeCe wrote about PJ<a href="http://adoptiondna.blogspot.com/2013/10/pj-hollands-dna-journey-to-find-his.html"> here</a>. A Dallas TV station broadcast his story, and that in turn got picked up nationally. It’s easy to see why.
PJ’s early life reads like a Charles Dickens novel. His mother, Agnes, grew up in South Dakota, got pregnant out of wedlock, and moved to Kentucky to have her son. She didn’t have the means to raise him herself and put him in an orphanage run by nuns. She hoped a good Catholic family would adopt him. She’d gotten a job in the laundry there so she could be near him, and would visit him regularly. But after a while an administrator stopped her from visiting because every time she left he would cry.
PJ and his niece Marilyn pieced some of his story together after years of collecting bits and pieces of information. Many, many years ago Marilyn had even gone so far as to organize a reunion of women who worked at the hospital where he was born. Although they had PJ’s mother’s name and were able to find some of those small details of his early life, Marilyn and PJ never were able to find his mother.
Marilyn even went so far as to send out letters to everyone with his godmother’s name who lived in Ohio, only to find out that she had died in 1935. Marilyn found his godfather, but he turned out to simply be the attending physician at the hospital where PJ was delivered.
“I tried so hard,” said Marilyn.
Then one day she logged onto PJ’s 23andMe account.
&#8220;This big pop-up comes on and said, &#8216;You have a first cousin match,&#8217; and I&#8217;m like, &#8216;Oh my God! I can&#8217;t believe this!'&#8221;
The match was with Cathryn Mudon, a 30-something aspiring actress in New York, who was identified by 23andMe as PJ’s, first or second cousin. (She is a first cousin once removed, meaning her father is PJ’s first cousin.)
Cathryn, who’d tested for health reasons after reading about Angelina Jolie’s breast cancer scare, didn’t quite get that this was a momentous connection for PJ.
<div id="attachment_19681" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19681" class="wp-image-19681 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/JohnMudonPJHolland-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/JohnMudonPJHolland-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/JohnMudonPJHolland.jpg 400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />PJ, left, and his new found first cousin John Mudon.</div>
&#8220;I didn&#8217;t understand the magnitude of it.  I was like, &#8216;Oh cool. Neat to meet you.&#8217; It&#8217;s such a distant generation that I didn&#8217;t think much of it,&#8221; Mudon told the Dallas TV station that covered his story. &#8220;And (Marilyn) was like, &#8216;You don&#8217;t understand. We&#8217;ve been searching for Agnes since 1970.&#8221;
It really went back much, much farther than that.
PJ had been looking his whole life. He was one of the few Depression era kids at the orphanage who didn’t get adopted. Many of them had been deposited in the orphanage because their families had fallen on hard times and simply couldn’t afford to care for them, but they sometimes visited.
On what the orphanage called “People’s Day,” relatives would come and see the children.
&#8220;All the orphans had people visit them on &#8216;people’s day&#8217; except me, because there were no relatives,&#8221; PJ said.
By 12, considered too old to be adopted, PJ been sent to work as a farmhand, but he ran away and hid in the convent. They let him work there until he left at 16, when he lied about his age so he could join the Army. When he got out the Army, it was Marilyn’s family who took him in. They helped the then 19 year-old get a high school education and a job.
PJ’s life has been anything but tragic. He did find a family who cared about him. Marilyn knew him as “Uncle PJ.” He traveled the world, met and married a beautiful woman, the artist<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilma_G._Holland"> Vilma Isabel Gonzalez Cordova Holland,</a> and succeeded in his career. But even after he retired and neared his 80s, PJ longed to find his mother.
Within a few hours of connecting with Cathryn through 23andMe, Marilyn talked to her on the phone. PJ eventually connected with Cathryn’s father, John, PJ’s first cousin. Cathryn and her father then made arrangements to visit PJ in Texas, bringing with them photos of his mother, but also of her brothers, sisters, and his grandparents.
<div id="attachment_19677" style="width: 249px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19677" class="wp-image-19677 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-239x300.jpg" alt="" width="239" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-239x300.jpg 239w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-768x962.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-817x1024.jpg 817w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-702x880.jpg 702w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-942x1180.jpg 942w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-scaled.jpg 2043w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 239px) 100vw, 239px" />PJ in his Army uniform in 1949.</div>
When John first saw PJ in the airport he said he immediately saw the family resemblance. PJ saw more photos of his mother, Agnes, most of them for the first time. He also heard a little bit about her from John. The family hadn’t known about the pregnancy, and after leaving South Dakota, Agnes never went back. She became estranged from her family, periodically sending letters to her youngest sister Hazel, John’s mother.
There are still gaps in the story that PJ would like to fill. For one, they know that his mother moved to Cincinnati and may have worked at a school. She died in 1989. They found the apartment where she used to live and the church she attended, but Marilyn said they’ve been unable to find out more.
They still hope that PJ’s story might prompt someone to come forward who remembered Agnes and give them more information about her life.
“But we would have never found her without 23andMe,” she said.
23andMe provides genetic testing services for informational purposes; your results may or may not help you to search for or identify relatives or family members.

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

23andMe Helps Man Find Family

As the series <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.</a> begins its 10-week run on PBS, The Blog will feature posts from 23andMe’s <a href="../2012/01/22/new-23andme-ancestry-ambassadors-group/">Ancestry Ambassadors</a> featuring their own stories about using DNA to dig into ancestry.
By Tim Janzen, M.D.
My father, Robert Janzen, comes from a long line of hardworking Low German Mennonite farmers. But when 23andMe developed the feature to identify <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/detail-for-ashkenazi-ancestry">Ashkenazi Jewish</a> heritage, I really wanted to determine whether his data suggested any Jewish ancestry. Let me explain.
His Mennonite ancestors were persecuted in the Low Countries – in what is now the Netherlands and Belgium – and in the 1500s they fled to a safer haven in what is now Poland.   After Catherine the Great opened Russia to settlers, his ancestors migrated to South Russia between 1789 and 1819 where they established small villages of Mennonites on the Russian Steppe.   After many
After Catherine the Great opened Russia to settlers, his ancestors migrated to South Russia between 1789 and 1819 where they established small villages of Mennonites on the Russian Steppe.   After many hardships they eventually prospered and developed thriving agricultural colonies that helped transform South Russia into the “breadbasket” of the world before about a third of the Mennonites immigrated to the United States in the 1870s.
The Mennonites who lived in Poland and Russia were an endogamous religious group, meaning they rarely married others who were not adherents to their faith. But there were
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-11779 size-full" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Jacob-Peters-and-Helena-Bergman.jpg" alt="" width="221" height="319" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Jacob-Peters-and-Helena-Bergman.jpg 221w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Jacob-Peters-and-Helena-Bergman-208x300.jpg 208w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 221px) 100vw, 221px" />
many exceptions to that practice, and over the centuries a significant number of non-Mennonites joined the Mennonite faith.   Relatives on my father’s mother’s side have said that one of our ancestors was Jewish. My father&#8217;s great uncle Johann Peters conveyed that we descend from a Catholic priest who married a “redheaded Jewess” sometime in the distant past. Who this was we do not know.
According to the historical record between 1750 and 1790 26,000 Jewish followers of Jacob Frank converted to Christianity in Poland. Perhaps my Jewish ancestor was among them. Traditional genealogical tools and family stories helped to identify some possibilities. There was Joseph Nowitzky (1776-1844), whose ancestry is cloaked in mystery.
The Nowitzky name is found among Ashkenazi Jews, and family stories from relatives in Canada said that Joseph Nowitzky was a traveling Jewish salesman whose daughter Maria Nowitzky lived with a Mennonite family and eventually married a son from that family.   But written records from South Russia suggest that Joseph Nowitzky had become a Mennonite by 1801.   He and his family are listed in the major Mennonite censuses from 1801 to 1816. Another relative has heard that we are descended from a woman of Jewish background named Justina von Liechtenstein. So I was faced with a problem many genealogists confront – an end to the paper trail and conflicting family stories. This is where using DNA can help. While any two people’s genomes are 99.5 percent identical, that small bit of difference is incredibly important. It’s what makes each of us unique and it allows genetic genealogists to find relatives and map out information about our ancestry. Fundamentally this comes down to making comparisons, either between individuals to see how closely they are related, or comparing an individual to groups of individuals to determine common ancestry.
The closer two people are related, the more similar their DNA. The more shared ancestry a person has with a group, the more segments of DNA he or she shares with that group of people. 23andMe compares individuals in their database with its Relative Finder tool and finds potential matches. Using an advanced tool called “Ancestry Finder,” you combine Relative Finder matches with ancestry survey information about the country of origin of their grandparents. This can help tell you more about your ancestry.
You can also tweak the controls and increase or decrease the length of the matching segments, measured in a unit called centimorgans (cMs). When I set the minimum segment size to five cMs, set the number of grandparents from the same country to one and clicked the box to show Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, Ancestry Finder indicated that between 2 percent and 3.8 percent of my father’s DNA is of Ashkenazi Jewish origin.
Results for my father&#8217;s sisters are similar and the average amount of DNA that is of <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/detail-for-ashkenazi-ancestry">Ashkenazi Jewish</a> origin for my father and his four sisters is 2.27 percent.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-11785 size-full" title="Ancestry Finder Display" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Ancestry-Finder-Display.jpg" alt="" width="468" height="362" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Ancestry-Finder-Display.jpg 468w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Ancestry-Finder-Display-300x232.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 468px) 100vw, 468px" />
I also have data from two distant relatives who descend from my father’s great-great-grandparents, Jacob Peters (b. 1823) and Helena Bergmann (b. 1826).   Helena Bergmann’s mother was Justina Nowitzky, who was a daughter of Joseph Nowitzky.   The Ancestry Finder results indicate that my father’s relatives have an average of 4.35% Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.   This would be consistent with each of them being approximately 1/32 Ashkenazi Jewish in origin.   The Ancestry Finder results for my father and his sisters would suggest that they are about 1/64 Ashkenazi Jewish in origin. I reviewed the 23andMe results of 33 other Mennonites, as well as the data from my father’s paternal cousins to see if they show any evidence of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.   None of them show more than 1 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.   These results confirm that my father indeed has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on his mother&#8217;s side.   I cannot prove at this time that the Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came through Joseph Nowitzky, but that is a strong possibility.   If the Jewish ancestry wasn’t from Joseph Nowitzky then it could have come from one or more of Jacob Peters’ and Helena Bergmann’s great-grandparents. In any
The Ancestry Finder results for my father and his sisters would suggest that they are about 1/64 Ashkenazi Jewish in origin. I reviewed the 23andMe results of 33 other Mennonites, as well as the data from my father’s paternal cousins to see if they show any evidence of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.   None of them show more than 1 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.   These results confirm that my father indeed has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on his mother&#8217;s side.   I cannot prove at this time that the Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came through Joseph Nowitzky, but that is a strong possibility.   If the Jewish ancestry wasn’t from Joseph Nowitzky then it could have come from one or more of Jacob Peters’ and Helena Bergmann’s great-grandparents. In any case the Ancestry Finder results from 23andMe confirm that my father does have Jewish ancestry as related in the family stories told by his great uncle Johann Peters.   Whether that ancestor was truly a redheaded Jewish woman may never be determined, but the 23andMe Ancestry Finder results certainly provide fascinating confirmation of an interesting family legend!

Tim Janzen is a family practice doctor at South Tabor Family Physicians in Portland, Oregon.   His interest in genealogical research goes back 35 years and he has particularly focused on Mennonite genealogy for the past 15 years.   He has a web site that summarizes many different sources available for Mennonite genealogical research found at <a href="http://www.timjanzen.com/">www.timjanzen.com</a> and has given many presentations about Mennonite genealogy in the United States and Canada.   He is the co-administrator of the Mennonite DNA project at <a href="http://www.mennonitedna.com/">www.mennonitedna.com</a>. He also serves on the ISOGG Y-DNA Haplogroup Tree Committee.   Tim is married to Rachel Janzen and they have four children.

Our Redheaded Jewish Grandmother

<div style="float: right; text-align: justified; width: 200px; background-color: #eee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;"><iframe loading="lazy" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/34531632?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0&amp;color=1d2d85" width="200" height="115" frameborder="0"></iframe>Finding Your Roots Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a 10-part series in which the Harvard scholar will delve into the genealogy and genetics of famous Americans. Gates uses history and science, including 23andMe’s ancestry tools, to explore race, family and identify in each episode. With the help from expert genealogists, historians and scientists –two of 23andMe’s own helped in the work – Gates reveals fascinating stories and interesting surprises in the family histories of Kevin Bacon, Robert Downey, Jr., Brandford Marsalis, John Legend, Martha Stewart, Barbara Walters and many others. 
23andMe’s Senior Director of Research, Joanna Mountain, is a geneticist who worked as a consultant on the series and was interviewed for a few of the episodes. Mountain, who completed her Ph.D. in Genetics at Stanford University, is also a guest blogger for the series. Her post below first appeared on the Finding Your Roots program page. We’re republishing it here with the permission of PBS.</div>
By Joanna Mountain, Ph.D.,  Senior Director of Research 23andMe
As a geneticist at 23andMe, I combine my understanding of human prehistory and DNA variation to develop tools that help people answer one of the more fundamental questions we ask ourselves:
“Where am I from?”
It’s always fascinating and often surprising to answer that question, as the powerful stories in PBS’s series “Finding Your Roots” illustrate.
Intriguingly, the question “Where are you from?” has a precise meaning for many eastern Africans, as I learned when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya.
I always respond to that question with “California,” where I have lived most of my life, rather than “England” where I was born.
But unlike many Americans, Kenyans often respond to that question with a description of their ancestral origins – the place and its people. They may never have visited the place or people, but that is where they are “from.”
The answer to this question about our deeper ancestry allows us to connect with our ancestors of hundreds or thousands of years ago.
If we go back far enough in human history the answer to the question “where are you from” is the same for everyone:
“We’re from Africa.”
But telling someone that “we are all from Africa” doesn’t really answer the question about a person’s origins.
Our DNA has no sense of where we live or where we were born, but it does point directly to our deeper ancestry and to where our ancestors were living over the last few thousand years. This power of DNA to answer questions about human prehistory is what drew me to genetics in the first place. Solving puzzles and mysteries has always fascinated me.
My passion for genetics is also rooted in Africa, in Kenya specifically, where I taught math and science as a Peace Corps volunteer 25 years ago. The mystery I came across there was in the faces, languages and diets as well as other cultural practices of the people I met. I couldn’t help being fascinated by the diversity. The tall, slender Nilotic-speaking Maasai of southwestern Kenya differ in so many ways from the Bantu-speaking Mijikenda who live on the eastern coast where I was teaching. I left Kenya mystified by the origins of that diversity.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-11489" title="Joanna in Kenya" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Joanna-in-Kenya-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Joanna-in-Kenya-300x199.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Joanna-in-Kenya-768x510.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Joanna-in-Kenya-1024x680.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Joanna-in-Kenya-880x584.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Joanna-in-Kenya-1180x784.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Shortly after I returned home to California, a friend introduced me to a famous geneticist at Stanford University, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Luca_Cavalli-Sforza#External_links">Luca Cavalli-Sforza</a>, who would give me the tools to solve that mystery. Cavalli-Sforza, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday, taught me the basics of DNA and the theories of population genetics. Together we poured over genetic data of peoples from all continents. Our goal was to discern the broad patterns of ancient human migrations.
I went on to earn my PhD in genetics, delving more deeply into the mysteries of human prehistory. Throughout my research I returned to focus on Africa, trying to understand the diversity that I had observed in Kenya. My research, conducted with collaborators from around the world, helped reveal the general shape of the history of African peoples over the last 100,000 years. We now believe that the ancestors of living peoples began to move from eastern or southern Africa into other parts of the continent by 75,000 years ago. This early spread within Africa explains the high level of genetic diversity in the continent today.
The diversity among the people of Kenya that I noticed over two decades ago, which sparked my interest in the study of genetics, has been explained in part by migrations into eastern Africa of people speaking all the major languages of Africa. We’ve learned this by combining genetic information with archaeological and linguistic evidence.
In the same way that we can understand the diversity within Africa, we can understand the diversity of all living people by studying DNA, archaeology and languages. Both the origins of humankind in Africa and the patterns of subsequent migration within and outside of Africa are written in the DNA of living people. We all share a common history in Africa, but the DNA of people both within Africa and elsewhere has differentiated over time as people migrated across the planet, becoming, until the last few hundred years, more and more isolated from one another.
Now that we know how DNA aligns with prehistoric migrations, we can trace the DNA of individuals to northern Europe or Central Asia, South America or the Near East, western Africa or Oceania. That information about where DNA is from can, in turn, answer questions about our ancestors. Were they struggling to feed their children through hunting red deer in northern Europe, harvesting shellfish in southeastern Asia, raising alpacas in the highland plateaus of western South America, or digging for tubers in eastern Africa? DNA shows that some of us have ancestors who faced the challenge of survival using several of these strategies.
<iframe loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xnZWMOpmoRk" width="420" height="315" frameborder="0"></iframe>
When Henry Louis Gates sits down with his guests and tells them their story of “where they are from” and explains their ancestry, it is a story that was written in their DNA many generations ago.
Joanna Mountain is a geneticist who is a consultant to the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” and consulted previously on the PBS series “Faces of America.” Dr. Mountain completed her PhD in Genetics at Stanford University and has spent over 20 years studying human genetic diversity. Currently, she is Senior Director of Research at <a href="https://www.23andme.com/">23andMe, Inc.</a>

Senior Director of Research, 23andMe

Joanna Mountain

Solving Mysteries via DNA

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-1923" title="istock_000000188373xsmall" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/istock_000000188373xsmall.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" />
Like many Americans, Vincent Vizachero knew only bits and pieces about his family history.   He knew, for instance, that his paternal grandfather emigrated to America from Italy in 1914. But because his grandfather died long before he was born, Vincent did not hear a lot of family stories growing up.   So he had to dig them up himself.   In his research, Vincent discovered that many people with his surname seemed to have come from the same small region in Italy.   He wanted to find out if all people with the Vizachero surname are somehow closely related.
The more he dug, however, the more roadblocks appeared in his way.   Three generations of civil and parish records in his grandfather’s hometown from the late 19th century were destroyed during World War II.     There was a gap between 1860 and 1910 where no information existed.
Problems like these often arise with genealogical research. But instead of giving up, Vincent decided to turn to another method – genetics.
As it turns out, Vincent is not alone.   Many genealogy buffs use genetics to enhance their research on family history.   In 2005, a group of genealogists formed the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG), kicking off a grassroots effort to incorporate genetic data into the fold of genealogy.   By this time, companies like <a id="oi03" title="Family Tree DNA" href="http://www.familytreedna.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Family Tree DNA</a> had been offering genetic testing for about five years, giving genealogists who had pored over historical records for years a completely new kind of information.

Many used DNA from the Y-chromosome, which is passed from father to son the same way surnames are passed down from one generation to the next.   Communities began to form, taking genetic data and trying to relate it to their own family histories rather than the broader scale addressed by academic researchers.   ISOGG began developing a ‘family tree’ based on genetic data from thousands of Y-chromosomes from hundreds of families around the world.   Some genealogists, like Adriano Squecco, have worked tirelessly to organize these data together into a <a id="x055" title="sharable format" href="http://daver.info/ysub/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sharable format</a> for anyone to view.
As data from thousands of individuals began rolling in, communities realized that many of the results coming back were quite similar — most people were being classified within very common branches of the Y-chromosome tree.   The people with the most interesting or unique DNA were usually not getting themselves tested.
Instead of waiting for academic researchers to find and genotype these individuals, a few enterprising genealogists, including Vincent Vizachero, decided to take matters into their own hands.   They started a fundraising effort, where people can donate money to buy the 23andMe Personal Genome Service for individuals with potentially interesting or unique genetic ancestry.   At first they tested more people of western European ancestry, to add detail in that already well-known part of the Y-chromosome tree. Now they are focusing their efforts on testing people of African descent, in an attempt to flesh out the genetic ancestry of the notoriously under-studied continent.   The major organizers of the effort have set up a website to keep track of their fundraising, along with periodic updates on their progress.
But why have Vincent and the other organizers chosen <a id="bxu8" title="23andMe’s Personal Genome ServiceTM" href="https://23andme.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">23andMe’s Personal Genome ServiceTM</a> , when there are so many different companies that test genetic ancestry?   “The decision was really about cost-effectiveness,” says Vincent.   “23andMe is including over 1,800 usable Y-SNPs for less than $400.   So the 23andMe service allows us to cover a lot of ground much more quickly than any other method of testing would allow.”
In addition, 23andMe allows customers to download their raw data.   While the casual customer may not use this feature, genetic genealogists relish the fact that their raw data is available for them to examine and manipulate.
What&#8217;s more, 23andMe provides other hereditary information that can be of interest to genealogists.   Some are using 23andMe to examine hereditary health and traits issues within their family trees.   And with the Family Inheritance feature, customers can see how various traits have been passed from generation to generation.
For genealogists, a thriving community is vital.   Such communities have been the cornerstone of traditional genealogical research for many years, and the addition of genetic data has only compounded their importance. Genealogists have even been able to contribute to science by helping identify new branches to the genetic family tree.   As their fundraising project continues to gain steam, Vincent and the other project organizers are pleased with the amount of information they have been able to extract, and how important the genealogy community is in fostering its development.   We at 23andMe recognize the importance of working with the genetic genealogy community and ISOGG to provide our customers, and we are thrilled that we can help this community flourish!

Building Roots from the Ground Up:  Genealogy 2.0

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-1669" title="roots-television-screenshot" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/roots-television-screenshot.jpg" alt="" width="305" height="187" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/roots-television-screenshot.jpg 305w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/roots-television-screenshot-300x184.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 305px) 100vw, 305px" />
People naturally yearn to know where they came from. Genealogists scratch that itch by poring over historical documents such as vital records, tax rolls, census lists and diaries to reconstruct their family history.
In recent years, genealogists have also begun using genetic information as another way of understanding their identity and establishing kinship. With the growth of several genetics companies specializing in genetic ancestry — including 23andMe’s <a href="https://23andme.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Personal Genome Service</a>â„¢ — genealogists now have an entirely new approach to use in tracing their roots. DNA is especially useful for recent immigrants, Native Americans or African-Americans whose ancestors left few historical records, but passed down a trail of genetic breadcrumbs that can lead back to a specific geographic region — and in some cases even a particular tribe.

The growth of genetic ancestry services, combined with the availability of resources on the internet, has also led many genealogists to share their stories and connect with others. Now Roots Television is adding viral video to the modern genealogist&#8217;s tool box. Roots Television markets itself as a video-based genealogy website, created for and by avid genealogists and family history lovers. They create online web shows on a variety of topics, while also licensing other programs. A recent glance at their programming line-up revealed a brief video on the art of document restoration, interviews with well-known genealogists, and reviews of new genealogy computer software. There is even an area of the site dedicated to user-submitted video, called RootsTube. Here, anyone can tell their story &#8211; whether it is an interesting discovery about their family history, a family reunion video, or even a tip on how to best utilize a particular genealogy resource.
So far there isn&#8217;t much content related to genetic genealogy, but the website is still in its infancy; we hope to see more genetics-related content over time.

genetic genealogy — Page 2

23andMe Helps Man Find Family

Our Redheaded Jewish Grandmother

Solving Mysteries via DNA

Building Roots from the Ground Up: Genealogy 2.0

Roots Television: The Internet TV Channel for Genealogists

Stay in the know.