
Uncover your ethnic mix, discover distant relatives, and find new details about your unique family history with a simple DNA test.
Like most Australians I’d always thought my ancestry was British – even traditional family history pointed in that direction. So when I posted my Ancestry DNA kit I was fairly certain a large chunk of my ethnicity would be British. But when I got back the results they were far from what I expected.
The DNA science revealed me to be a blend of Irish, Scandinavian, Western European and British – in that order. This news sent me back to my family tree to shake the branches a little harder and, spurred on by this new information, I uncovered a connection to Ireland that took me back centuries.
“The marriage of science and history was really impressive.”
But my search took me further than discovering new branches in my tree. Ancestry’s Cousin Matches put me in touch with a 5th cousin in America. By combining my family tree with their extensive DNA database Ancestry was able to connect me with a cousin who shared an ancestor in Northumberland almost 200 years ago. As the story unfolded we discovered one brother went to America to start their branch of the tree and the other went to Australia to start mine.
This marriage of science and history was really impressive. Not only did it give me surprising insights into my ethnic mix but it also opened up new paths for exploration.
Identity is an interesting concept. Many people like to believe that they define their own identity. But in reality there’s much more to it than the decisions we make in our own lives. For example, how much is nature and how much is nurture? How much are we defined by the people around us? Or society, even?
“I started considering how much of my identity was defined by my family history.”
Having given these questions much thought, I thought a good starting point would be to look back and start researching my own family history. When I was young I always thought I was 100% British. My Dad was born in Edgware and my mum in Hampshire. Of course, none of us are truly 100% British and as I got older I learnt that my Dad had Russian great-grandparents on one side and German on the other, and that my great grand-parents on my mother’s side were Greek. So I suppose this is when I started considering how much of my identity was defined by my family history.
When I found out about AncestryDNA, I thought this could be the perfect tool to pinpoint where my family emigrated over the past few hundred years (AncestryDNA can actually go back 1000 years) and give me a focus where to take my search next. When I got the email that my results were ready I felt like a kid on Christmas day. They revealed that I was only 40% British, 25% German and 35% Greek. I’ve now focused my search on these three countries and already discovered ancestors I never knew existed.
People often look at me and wonder what I am. I’ve always know I was a mix, like a minestrone soup, and the more I’ve found out about my family’s past and heritage, the more my own identity has changed and evolved.
“People often look at me and wonder what I am.”
I was born in NYC, the youngest of five kids. My parents and three older siblings were born in Bogota, Columbia. My name implies Hispanico/Latino roots but when I’m with my Polynesian friends people always think I’m Hawaiian or a mix of Polynesian and something else. I recently attended a Nepali church service and people asked me what part of Nepal I was from.
As my dad and I have begun to explore our genealogy over the past seven years or so, we’ve found that our family is largely from Spain, which is no big surprise. Columbians have a wide range of ethnicities, which explains why many Columbians, including my mother, have white or fair skin with blue eyes. My dad also suspects we have German ancestry somewhere back there.
A friend of mine knew I had been working on my family history and bought me an AncestryDNA kit for my birthday. My results were surprising to say the least. I discovered I’m 35% Native American, 5% African and 29% from the Iberian Peninsula. This has drastically broadened the way I think about my identity and heritage. I feel connected to those parts of the world now and I’m excited to see how far back our records can go.
Our team of expert population geneticists, statisticians, data scientists, engineers and molecular biologists are working with the latest technological advances to bring you some of the most powerful tools in genealogy research.
Ken Chahine is President of Ancestry.com DNA, LLC and has been with the company since 2011. Prior to joining AncestryDNA, he held positions at several institutions, including Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals (currently Pfizer), the University of Utah and was also Chief Executive Officer of the biotechnology company Avigen. Dr. Chahine also teaches a course focused on new venture development, intellectual property, and licensing at the University of Utah's College of Law. He earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Michigan, a J.D. from the University of Utah College of Law, and a B.A. in Chemistry from Florida State University. ...
Catherine Ball is a genomic scientist who has annotated and mined the genomes of various organisms and created resources to help clinicians, citizens and other scientists exploit and explore genome data. Dr. Ball has collaborated on the annotation of the first sequenced eukaryotic genome (brewer's yeast) and has collaboratively built databases to explore the genomes of yeast, E. coli and the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. As a pioneer in data analysis resources for high-throughput biomedical technologies, she led the Stanford Microarray Database, the largest academic database of its kind. Dr. Ball has used high-throughput biomedical data to shed light on diverse research topics, from the biology of infectious organisms to the mechanisms involved in cell division and cancer. She received a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Ball was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley prior to her research in the Departments of Genetics and Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. ...
Natalie Myres has over 10 years of experience in the biotechnology industry with a focus on developing consumer-based DNA testing products. Prior to joining the AncestryDNA team, she began working at Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation (SMGF), later becoming the Director of Research and Development. During her time at SMGF she has managed the bioinformatics and data production/processing functions associated with constructing the SMGF database, the largest database of linked genetic and genealogical information in the world. Ms. Myres has also managed product development and business development activities for SMGF. Additionally, Natalie works with an international team of scientists conducting research on the human Y chromosome, which focuses on understanding population affinity, substructure and history in modern-day populations. She is the co-author of numerous peer-reviewed scientific publications on Y chromosome population genetics. Ms. Myres received a B.S. in molecular biology and a M.S. in biochemistry from Brigham Young University. She also holds M.B.A. degrees from Columbia University and U.C. Berkeley. ...
Jake Byrnes is a biologist with expertise in evolution, population genetics and statistics. In his previous work, Dr. Byrnes used DNA sequence and genotype data to study human population expansion, migration, and evolution in the Americas. Using computer-aided statistical analysis, Dr. Byrnes was able to identify and date events such as European colonization of the Caribbean, the effects of sex-bias in the migration and was even able to identify which West African populations likely contributed to the slave-trade on the islands. Dr. Byrnes received a B.A. from the New College of Florida. He then moved to Chicago where he received an M.S. degree in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from the University of Chicago. After graduate school, Dr. Byrnes moved to Oxford, England where he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Welcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford University. Most recently, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Carlos Bustamante's laboratory at Stanford University. ...
Mathew Barber is a statistical geneticist with expertise in designing and implementing statistical tools for genetic data, from pedigree data to distantly related individuals. Dr. Barber received a Mathematics Degree from Nottingham University, UK. A biology and genetics enthusiast, he then took a Masters course in Biometry (biostatistics) at Reading University (UK), specializing in statistical genetics. Dr. Barber also worked as part of the Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit, King’s College London. Following this, he undertook his Ph.D. studies at Cambridge University researching statistical methods for the analysis of genetics data. After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Barber moved to the University of Chicago where he worked with Dr. Matthew Stephens and subsequently Dr. Dan Nicolae, both of whom are in the Departments of Statistics and Human Genetics. ...
Ross Curtis joined the AncestryDNA team in January of 2012. His background is in computational biology, specializing in genetics and visual analytics, and he loves applying his expertise to family history and genealogy. Before AncestryDNA, Dr. Curtis focused on using visualization and statistics to discover genetic mutations that contribute to disease. Dr. Curtis received his B.S. from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Carnegie Mellon University. ...
Keith Noto is a computer scientist with expertise in machine learning. Dr. Noto has developed several novel algorithms with applications in a variety of biologically-motivated tasks, including transcription factor discovery in mammalian DNA promoters, text classification and ranking for specialized biomedical databases, and anomaly detection in fetal human microarray data. Dr. Noto received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has extended his training by taking postdoctoral research appointments at the University of California at San Diego and most recently at Tufts University. ...
Yong Wang is a geneticist whose formal training emphasized understanding the evolutionary history of human populations. Dr. Wang’s research involves developing computational and statistical methods for genomic data analysis and estimating the demographic histories that best explain observed patterns of genetic variation among modern and ancient humans. Prior to joining AncestryDNA, Dr. Wang worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Rasmus Nielsen at the University of California, Berkeley, where he contributed to genome analyses of Aboriginal Australians and the Paleo-Eskimos. His work has led to a series of co-authored publications in high-impact scientific journals including Science, Nature and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS USA). Dr. Wang received a Ph.D. in Genetics and a M.S. in Statistics from Rutgers University. He also received a B.S. in Life Sciences and a B.E. in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China. ...
Julie Granka is a biologist and a statistician with expertise in genetics and evolution. Dr. Granka has experience developing and applying advanced computational tools to genetic data to understand population history and evolution. During fieldwork in South Africa, she collected and analyzed DNA samples from an African hunter-gatherer population to uncover the genetic basis of human height and skin pigmentation. Dr. Granka has also analyzed numerous other African populations to identify regions of the human genome where positive natural selection has occurred in recent history. In addition, she has studied the genetics of other organisms, including M. tuberculosis, the organism that causes tuberculosis. Dr. Granka received a B.S. in Biometry and Statistics from Cornell University where she worked with Dr. Carlos Bustamante. Afterwards, she received an M.S. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Biology with Dr. Marcus Feldman at Stanford University. ...
Amir Kermany is a computational biologist with expertise in population genetics. Prior to joining AncestryDNA in July of 2014, Amir pursued his research career as a postdoctoral associate at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and in the Department of Mathematics at Université de Montréal (UDM). His Ph.D. research was focused on diffusion processes in population genetics and theoretical models for studying the evolutionary advantage of sex and recombination. During his appointment at UDM, Dr. Kermany developed a new method to calculate the fixation probability of a new mutation in a population, using the Ancestral Recombination-Selection-Graph and conducted research on ancestral processes in population genetics. As a postdoctoral associate at HHMI, he developed a new method to analyze genotypes obtained from trisomic products of conception to learn about the origins of aneuploidy in humans. Dr. Kermany holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Concordia University, a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, and a B.Sc. in Physics from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. On his time away from deciphering cryptic messages written on DNA, Dr. Kermany enjoys observing the products of evolution in nature, reading, swimming and biking. ...
Christine (Eunjung) Han is a computational biologist with expertise in population genetics, statistics, and data visualization skills. Dr. Han’s research focus has been on the intersection of statistical genomics and evolution. She developed statistical methods to investigate the genetic basis of adaptive evolution during early dog domestication from grey wolves. In addition, she developed a fast and efficient dynamic programming algorithm to estimate population genetic summary statistics from large samples of low coverage next-generation sequencing data. She received a B.S. in Biotechnology from Yonsei University in Korea. Afterwards, Dr. Han received a M.S. and a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from University of California, Los Angeles where she worked with Dr. John Novembre and Dr. Janet Sinsheimer. ...
Peter Carbonetto is a computer scientist who has brought his broad experience in machine learning and large-scale computation to investigate important questions about the genetic basis of common diseases. In his research, Dr. Carbonetto has showed that developing more sophisticated statistical models can reveal additional links between genes and disease from existing medical studies. His recent work published in PLoS Genetics provided strong support for the role of cytokine signaling genes in inflammatory bowel disease, and IL2-mediated signaling genes in type 1 diabetes. Dr. Carbonetto received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from McGill University. From there, he moved to Vancouver, where he received a Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia. After graduate school, Peter Carbonetto moved to Chicago to pursue research at the intersection of genomics and large-scale computing. His postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago was supported by a cross-disciplinary fellowship from the Human Frontiers Science Program. ...
Dr. Philip Awadalla's research includes work relevant to human genomics and a broad range of chronic and rare diseases, including genetic infectious diseases in the developing world. Dr. Awadalla is also the Principal Investigator and Director of the CARTaGENE Biobank of Quebec. This prospective public health survey of Quebec, in its first phase, captured biological, clinical, genealogical and genomic data from over 20,000 participants. He is also co-director of the Centre for Child Health Genomics at University of Montreal and he currently holds the Genome Quebec recruitment award for Population and Medical Genomics. ...
Jeffrey Botkin is Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities and serves as the Associate Vice President for Research Integrity at the University of Utah. His research is focused on the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetic technology with a particular emphasis on research ethics, genetic testing for cancer susceptibility, biobanking, newborn screening, and prenatal diagnosis. Dr. Botkin formerly was Chair of the Committee on Bioethics for the American Academy of Pediatrics and a former member of the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections at DHHS. Dr. Botkin is currently a member of the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Heritable Diseases in Newborns and Children. He chairs the NIH's Embryonic Stem Cell Working Group and is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center. ...
Dr. Carlos Bustamante is a Population Geneticist who received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research focuses on analyzing genome-wide patterns of variation within and between species to address fundamental questions in biology, anthropology, and medicine. During the past nine years as a faculty member at Cornell and Stanford, he has trained about 40 post-doctoral fellows and graduate students as a primary advisor. Much of his research is at the interface of computational biology, mathematical genetics, and evolutionary genomics. ...
Mark Daly directs computational biology for the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School Medical and Population Genetics Program. Dr. Daly holds a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in genetics from Leiden University. Previously, he was the director of the Human Genetics Informatics group at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research. Dr. Daly's group now currently develops and actively supports GENEHUNTER and MAPMAKER/QTL software, used by hundreds of labs worldwide, for performing linkage analyses in natural and experimental pedigrees and more recently has released Haploview, which has become a standard for LD analysis and is a primary analysis and visualization tool used in the HapMap Project. ...
John Novembre earned his Ph.D. under Dr. Montgomery Slatkin at the University of California-Berkeley, before taking an NSF Bioinformatics Fellowship at the University of Chicago under Dr. Matthew Stephens. At the University of Chicago, Dr. Novembre's research focuses on developing population genetic theory and statistical methods for population genetic data, such as high-throughput single nucleotide polymorphism data and next-generation sequencing data. His work focuses on question relevant to human evolution and ancestry, the mapping of disease traits, and spatial population structure. ...