chloe
02-23-2010, 06:50 AM
SALT LAKE CITY -- There are some revolutionary new developments in the world of researching your ancestry, and it's all possible because of a simple test that unlocks the unique information we all carry around inside of us.
They are essential human questions: Who are you and where do you come from? Utah geneticist Scott Woodward's journey to find out started a decade ago when he got an unexpected call in the middle of the night from philanthropist billionaire James Sorenson, who asked him if it was possible to map out the DNA of Norway.
"The reason was that he traced his genealogy back in to Norway, and he was very interested in finding out how he connected," Woodward explained.
That call triggered a breathtaking effort to collect two things: DNA samples from people around the world -- gathered by a simple mouth rinse -- and family pedigrees.
"You can take bits and pieces of anybody in the world and find common connections," Woodward said. Now, more than 100,000 samples have been collected. They form a huge database, publicly available through the company GeneTree.com. It's a genetic roadmap of human history.
"We really are one big family. That is what our DNA is telling us," Woodward said.
DNA tells us a lot surprising information; for me, on both my dad's and my mom's side.
"In your case, both your Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA are relatively rare; so because of that, we were able to find some very tight matches," Woodward said.
Family lore has long included a history tracing back to Ireland and England in the early 1800s. We knew that, but the genetic-genealogy link uncovered previously unknown relatives, a connection to the Basque country of northern Spain, branches of the tree entirely new to us, and a head-scratching mystery.
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=9777300
They are essential human questions: Who are you and where do you come from? Utah geneticist Scott Woodward's journey to find out started a decade ago when he got an unexpected call in the middle of the night from philanthropist billionaire James Sorenson, who asked him if it was possible to map out the DNA of Norway.
"The reason was that he traced his genealogy back in to Norway, and he was very interested in finding out how he connected," Woodward explained.
That call triggered a breathtaking effort to collect two things: DNA samples from people around the world -- gathered by a simple mouth rinse -- and family pedigrees.
"You can take bits and pieces of anybody in the world and find common connections," Woodward said. Now, more than 100,000 samples have been collected. They form a huge database, publicly available through the company GeneTree.com. It's a genetic roadmap of human history.
"We really are one big family. That is what our DNA is telling us," Woodward said.
DNA tells us a lot surprising information; for me, on both my dad's and my mom's side.
"In your case, both your Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA are relatively rare; so because of that, we were able to find some very tight matches," Woodward said.
Family lore has long included a history tracing back to Ireland and England in the early 1800s. We knew that, but the genetic-genealogy link uncovered previously unknown relatives, a connection to the Basque country of northern Spain, branches of the tree entirely new to us, and a head-scratching mystery.
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=9777300