anyone familiar with this Dr. Spence who claims that DNA analysis is a HOAX?

[grasswire]

http://www.spenceforensics.com/dnaancestry.html

Egad. My cousin is all wrought up over this. His sisters were entreating him to get swabbed. Some sort of paranoia has set in; he cites this Dr. Spence.

[Turbineguy]

1. My Grandmother was Dutch.

[ret5hd]

2. Uh oh...sounds like somebody is afraid...

they might be part "colored". (read the link)

[grasswire]

3. well I never thought of that possibility

interesting. But I suspect it is some other kind of paranoia. He lives in a yurt in the woods and is a timber man. Probably an anti-vaxxer, too.

[ret5hd]

4. anti-vaxxer and...

anti-"i'm part black".

[grasswire]

5. ha!

His mother had black hair and a medium complexion, but if I had to guess anything I would say there might be some Native American blood there just from the facial structure. Just my ignorant guess, though.

[appalachiablue]

6. I read the link & the Telegraph article. Hmm, just about to send in my kit too. I wonder if there

could be concern about the testing & any records for criminal links/associations, also mistakes and privacy issues. And the ancestral & racial origins info. factors. I don't know enough about this yet, but thought the tests were legit.

[pipi_k]

8. Well the test I did

With Ancestry connected me with 46 pages full of people with matching DNA


Four of those people are my first to fourth cousins who have also taken the test. I already knew we were related because we contacted each other 5 or more years ago, way before doing the test, so I would say there is a high probability that the test I did with Ancestry is accurate with regards to the rest of the cousins listed

[appalachiablue]

11. Thanks for the info., good to know. 46 pages of relations interesting. Looking forward to our

results esp. ancestry origin. Most is No. European with possible Iberian (Portuguese) and Native American background based on family oral history and photographs. That would be really valuable.

[PyaarRevolution]

14. Found some interesting info myself.

A portion of my DNA is from the Iberian Peninsula and then an even smaller portion(very small) is North African. Knowing about Charlemagne driving out the Black Muslims in Spain at the time and knowing the ethnic group makes me suspect I have Fulani blood since they were the Muslims at the time around that region. That was their ethnicity so to speak but their behavior was that of nomads, they were known as the Berber. The Berbers are still around today to my knowledge.

[Joe Chi Minh]

13. You could ask the people at this blog llink: http://www.uncommondescent.com/off-topic/ba77s-off-topi

Excepting yours truly, they all seem to be brilliant scientists, lawyers, etc., and have a particular interest in DNA and the latest discoveries in quantum physics concerning it.

PS: The address is a lot longer than it appears above, but I tried it and it works - shows the full address.

[appalachiablue]

7. Forgot to mention, some companies permit you to match/find relatives with same DNA

if it's in their data base & you want to. So interested people with links contact each other I guess. An article I read was about a young woman who used the '23andMe' kit & linked to a sibling by her father before his marriage to her mother I believe. Maybe this is another issue. I ordered a kit from Ancestry.com, discussed mostly how far back the tracing can go. If you call them (free 800 no.) I'm sure they could tell you more about the system. Best of luck.

[DebJ]

9. Something about that webpage made me feel like I need to run Norton.

Seemed like gobble de gook to me, the way it was written.


Perhaps a better written, logical point would have been to say that people who anticipate that these tests will give you
an actual family tree will be disappointed? One of the article links pointed out that you might get, for an example,
something indicating who your 16th great grandmother was, but that she would only be one of many 16th great grandmothers.

Well, no! DUH.

I don't think these articles were worth anything for anyone with a concept of genealogy.

[grasswire]

10. yeah, weird

He has a book to sell, calling out the "hoax".

[Matilda]

12. I don't know anything about this Dr. Spence,

but I've been doing a lot of reading about DNA testing, partly out of curiosity about whether I could trace where my more distant ancestors came from, and more recently because of my interest in the testing carried out on the descendants of the sister of Richard III.

The second case is undoubtedly genuine, but when you consider the issues - the rarity of the find, and the importance of correct identification, you know that many thousands, tens of thousands, of pounds would have been spent in the testing process. They couldn't afford the tiniest error on that one.

But while this is technically possible, it does seem that only the most general kind of testing can be carried out on all the individuals who want to find out where they came from, because there isn't the time or resources to be as thorough as people might wish. The fact that the results from various sites can vary is proof that while the science is genuine, the process of mass testing leaves a lot to be desired.

Dr Spence seems to imply that it's all a cynical con game, and maybe that's true to some degree. I think it probably is a way of cashing in on the great interest in genealogy that's come about from series like Who Do You Think You Are?, and there are accredited websites that do imply they can achieve much more than they really can, even claiming you might find a link to Elizabeth I, or Louis IV, etc. To prove a link to anybody who died hundreds of years ago, you'd need not only your DNA but theirs as well, so unless family records show your descent from somebody illustrious, you're never going to be able to prove it.

I decided to save my money and just keep ploughing through records now and then to see if anything new has come up.