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GeneaNet : Community : Genealogy Blog Saturday Nov 21, 2009

Genealogy Blog 


21 November 2009

New Zealander Antiques Dealer Claims Harry Potter Castle

A Napier (New Zealand) antiques dealer has claimed that his family are the rightful heirs to one of Britain's most famous dynasties, which owns the castle used in the Harry Potter movies.

Kevin Percy, 74, believes his family was cheated out of inheriting the Earl of Northumberland's massive estate, now conservatively valued at $685m.

He has started a bold bid asking British authorities, including the Queen, to exhume the bodies of two suspected relatives for DNA tests, which he says would prove or disprove his claim. The two men died in 1560 and 1716.

His bid targets one of Britain's most celebrated noble families, which dominated the Middle Ages. The earldom owns nearly 50,000 hectares of land in Britain.

Source & Full Story

20 November 2009

People Prefer Partners With Similar Ancestry

The study shows that Mexicans mate according to proportions of Native American to European ancestry, while Puerto Ricans are more likely to settle down with someone carrying a similar mix of African and European genes.

For the research, Neil Risch, from the University of California, San Francisco, and his team studied the effects of ancestry on partner choice in Mexicans and Puerto Ricans living in their own countries or in the USA.

The subjects came from The Genetics of Asthma in Latino Americans (GALA) study, conducted by Risch’s UCSF colleague, Esteban Gonzalez Burchard.

Source & Full Story

13 November 2009

Five Ghanaian Tribes submit DNA for Ancestoral Clues

The Sankofa Project was launched at the Public Records and Archives Administration in Ghana on October 30, 2009. Several hundred Ghanaians from the Ewe, Ga, Fante, Nzema and Asante tribes participated in the genealogy and DNA workshop in hopes to discover their distant relatives in the Diaspora. CAAGRI Communications Director, Greg Russell noted that the organization’s efforts are unique and the first of its kind. "We are a non-profit organization that is committed to restoring the legacies of our African ancestors and this is our effort towards that end. This kind of outreach has never been done before and we are just very humbled to be able to make a contribution to history."

In addition to the possibilities of reconnecting families, the project will also help researchers better understand human migration patterns which in turn will verify true tribal origins. CAAGRI’s founder and CEO, Paula D. Royster said "there are no guarantees that any DNA matches will occur". However, Royster continued, "this is a first step in a long process to identify geographic regions, tribal affiliations and then true genetic matches."

Source & Full Story

21 October 2009

The First Men And Women From The Canary Islands Were Berbers

Researchers from the University of La Laguna (ULL), the Institute of Pathology and Molecular Immunology from the University of Porto (Portugal) and the Institute of Legal Medicine from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) have studied the Y chromosome from human dental remains from the Canary Islands, and have determined the origin and evolution of paternal lineages from the pre-Hispanic era to the present day. To date, only mitochondrial DNA has been studied, which merely reflects the evolution of maternal lineages.

Rosa Fregal, the principal author of the recently-published study in BMC Evolutionary Biology, and a researcher from the Genetics Department of the ULL, explains to SINC that "whereas aboriginal maternal lineages have survived with a slight downward trend, aboriginal paternal lineages have declined progressively, being replaced by European lineages".

Source & Full Story

8 October 2009

Genotype Analysis Identifies the Cause of the British "Royal Disease"

The British "Royal Disease," a blood disorder transmitted from Queen Victoria to European royal families, is a striking example of X-linked recessive inheritance. Although the disease is widely recognized to be a form of the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia, its molecular basis has never been identified, and the royal disease is now extinct.

We identified the likely disease-causing mutation by applying genomic methodologies (multiplex target amplification and massively parallel sequencing) to historical specimens from the Romanov branch of the royal family. The mutation occurs in F9, a gene on the X chromosome that encodes blood coagulation Factor IX, and is predicted to alter RNA splicing and lead to production of a truncated form of Factor IX. Thus, the royal disease is the severe form of hemophilia, also known as hemophilia B or Christmas disease.

Evgeny I. Rogaev, Anastasia P. Grigorenko, Gulnaz Faskhutdinova, Ellen L. W. Kittler, Yuri K. Moliaka

Source & Full Story

3 October 2009

Is Colleen Fitzpatrick The World's Greatest DNA Detective?

Colleen Fitzpatrick, who drives a dented Camry and rocks a pet parrot to sleep each night, is not one to brag. But if pressed, she'll tell you, over lemonade and bananas from her tree, "I can find anybody in the world."

When the U.S. military found a severed arm from a 1948 plane crash, they called Fitzpatrick. When Titanic experts exhumed the remains of the Unknown Child, they too called Fitzpatrick.

She once tracked down a homeless woman in Buenos Aires; a widow in Estonia; and a whistle-blower from the 1920s Teapot Dome Scandal who'd changed his name and moved to Australia. And died.

Finding people is her thing.

Source & Full Story

24 September 2009

Scandinavians Are Descended From Stone Age Immigrants

Today's Scandinavians are not descended from the people who came to Scandinavia at the conclusion of the last ice age but, apparently, from a population that arrived later, concurrently with the introduction of agriculture. This is one conclusion of a new study straddling the borderline between genetics and archaeology, which involved Swedish researchers and which has now been published in the journal Current Biology.

"The hunter-gatherers who inhabited Scandinavia more than 4,000 years ago had a different gene pool than ours," explains Anders Götherström of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University, who headed the project together with Eske Willerslev of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.

Source & Full Story

10 September 2009

Fromelles Grave Excavation Ends

The remains of 250 soldiers killed at the Battle of Fromelles in northern France have been recovered after a four-month archaeological operation.

The remains from the group burial at Pheasant Wood will be reburied with full military honours at a new military cemetery close to the site. German forces buried the Australian and British soldiers after the 1916 battle. Soldiers from Bristol, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire were heavily involved in the fighting.

The excavation, which began in May 2008, was carried out by Oxford Archaeology whose final day in the field will be 14 September. DNA samples have been taken from every soldier and specialists in the UK are attempting to extract DNA strands from the samples to help the identification process.

Source & Full Story

10 August 2009

DNA Tests Begin To Identify Fromelles Dead From Mass Grave

DNA tests will begin this week on the remains of hundreds of British and Australian soldiers killed in the First World War's Battle of Fromelles.

Between 250 and 300 bodies have been discovered in mass graves in northern France, where they were buried by German forces after the disastrous 1916 battle.

The soldiers' remains are being exhumed and will be laid to rest with full military honours in individual graves at a new Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery.

A full programme of DNA testing will be carried out in an attempt to establish the identities of the bodies and notify relatives.

Source & Full Story

24 July 2009

Australian Aborigines Initially Arrived Via South Asia

Genetic research indicates that Australian Aborigines initially arrived via south Asia. Researchers have found telltale mutations in modern-day Indian populations that are exclusively shared by Aborigines.

Dr Raghavendra Rao worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India to sequence 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian 'relic populations'. He said, "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry. We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines. This shared ancestry suggests that the Aborigine population migrated to Australia via the so-called 'Southern Route'".

Source & Full Story

18 July 2009

Who Killed the Men of England?

There are no signs of a massacre--no mass graves, no piles of bones. Yet more than a million men vanished without a trace. They left no descendants. Historians know that something dramatic happened in England just as the Roman empire was collapsing. When the Anglo-Saxons first arrived in that northern outpost in the fourth century a.d.--whether as immigrants or invaders is debated--they encountered an existing Romano-Celtic population estimated at between 2 million and 3.7 million people.

Latin and Celtic were the dominant languages. Yet the ensuing cultural transformation was so complete, says Goelet professor of medieval history Michael McCormick, that by the eighth century, English civilization considered itself completely Anglo-Saxon, spoke only Anglo-Saxon, and thought that everyone had “come over on the Mayflower, as it were.” This extraordinary change has had ramifications down to the present, and is why so many people speak English rather than Latin or Celtic today. But how English culture was completely remade, the historical record does not say.

Source & Full Story

via Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

15 July 2009

New Website: Pathway Genomics

Pathway Genomics, a privately held, venture‐backed company, today announced its launch, including the company’s web site, www.pathway.com.

Pathway Genomics offers affordable genetic tests for under $250, enabling consumers to confidentially learn about their risk for various diseases, adverse drug responses, carrier status, and ancestral history. Leveraging customized and highly innovative DNA genotyping technologies, Pathway Genomics generates the most extensive analysis of an individual’s risk for disease and can trace the path of a person’s maternal and paternal ancestry back more than 150,000 years.

via The Genetic Genealogist

7 July 2009

Analysis Of Copernicus Putative Remains Support Identity

The efforts to identify the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), found under the cathedral in Frombork, was made in a collaborative project between Swedish and Polish scientists in a team consisting of archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists. The results is published this week in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

At Uppsala University a DNA analysis was performed of shed hairs found in a book owned by Copernicus for decades, and now kept in Museum Gustavianum at Uppsala University.

"The analysis of several hairs resulted in interpretable profiles for four of the hairs. Of these, two of the hairs have the same profile as the putative remains of Copernicus", says Marie Allen, researcher at Uppsala University.

Source & Full Story

3 July 2009

No Etruscan Link To Modern Tuscans

The current population of Tuscany is not descended from the Etruscans, the people that lived in the region during the Bronze Age, a new Italian study has shown.

Researchers at the universities of Florence, Ferrara, Pisa, Venice and Parma discovered the genealogical discontinuity by testing samples of mitochondrial DNA from remains of Etruscans and people who lived in the Middle Ages (between the 10th and 15th centuries) as well as from people living in the region today.

While there was a clear genetic link between Medieval Tuscans and the current population, the relationship between modern Tuscans and their Bronze Age ancestors could not be proven, the study showed.

Source & Full Story

Experts Call For Federal Regulation Of Genetic Ancestry Testing

Imagine donating a sample of your DNA to help researchers study the genetics of diabetes. The disease is common among your friends and family, and you're proud of your role in finding out why. Now, imagine that some time later, you learn that your DNA has been used for other studies on topics you never expected — schizophrenia, human migration, inbreeding. Although your name isn't attached to the sample anymore, scientists are using your DNA to draw conclusions about your community and your ancestors. Some of these studies violate your cultural beliefs.

That's what happened to the Havasupai Tribe of Arizona. In 2004, they sued Arizona State University, the institution that originally collected the DNA, for failing to provide ethical oversight on the use of the samples. The case is still working its way through the courts.

Source & Full Story

29 June 2009

Americans Seek Their African Roots

First it was Oprah Winfrey's wistful reach for the continent, now other prominent African Americans are finding their roots.

In 2005 Oprah Winfrey underwent DNA testing in an effort to determine the genetic make-up of her body's cells. The popular American talk show host wanted to know where her ancestors, taken as slaves to the United States, had come from.

Since then thousands of other African Americans have followed suit, many of them household names in the US.

Comedian Chris Rock discovered that he was descended from the Udeme people of northern Cameroon. LeVar Burton, an actor who played the slave Kunta Kinte in the TV drama Roots, linked himself up genetically with the Hausa in Nigeria.

Source & Full Story

20 June 2009

Google Invests Another $2.6M in DNA Analysis Firm 23andMe

Google revealed in a regulatory filing that it has invested another $2.6 million in 23andMe, a developer of DNA analysis technologies co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Google also had previously invested $3.9 million in the company in May 2007, and purchased an additional $500,000 stake in the company from another investor in November of that year.

Founded in 2006 by Linda Avey and Wojcicki, 23andMe offers services designed to help people learn more about their personal ancestry, genealogy and inherited traits through DNA analysis technologies and Web-based interactive tools.

Source & Full Story

19 June 2009

DNA Key to Naming Soldiers Buried Where They Fell

Every year, construction workers or farmers churning up the soil of Western Europe unearth the bodies of a handful of Canadian troops killed in the two world wars. Even after their skeletal remains are found, though, the servicemen's identity often stays a mystery.

But now the National Defence Department is planning to keep a team of experts on retainer who can routinely use genetic testing and other advanced forensic tools to try to attach a name to the long-dead soldiers, airmen or sailors.

The department recently issued a contract for a "mortuary service provider" to handle both movement of the remains and the painstaking historical and scientific work involved in trying to identify them, with DNA analysis being the newest and final tool in the process.

The unusual contract calls for the services of forensic archeologists, forensic anthropologists and genealogical researchers.

Source & Full Story

9 June 2009

Russian Journal of Genetic Genealogy

The first issue of the Russian Journal of Genetic Genealogy is now published.

Articles are in Russian and it is believed that English translations will be provided in the future.

Source

2 June 2009

DNA Test to Discover Tutankhamun's Parentage

Egyptian researchers are using DNA tests to discover the lineage of pharaoh king Tutankhamun, whose ancestry remains a mystery to Egyptologists, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Monday.

The young king, whose mummy was found in a gold and turquoise sarcophagus by English archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, ruled Egypt between 1333 and 1324 BC.

His ancestry has been as much a source of speculation as his abrupt end.

The testing will mostly be done in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt, where pharaonic royalty was mummified, Hawass said.

The result will be announced in February.

Source & Full Story

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