How to Interpret Your DNA Test Results For Family History & Ancestry: Scientists Speak Out on Genealogy Joining Genetics

What’s the cultural component behind a trait as biological as your genes? If you’re a beginning family historian, an oral history researcher, or a person with no science background fascinated with ancestry, here’s how to understand and use the results of DNA tests. Scientists, media, historians, and business owners share different opinions on whether DNA testing is a useful tool in the hands of family historians.

Steve Olson, author of the book, Mapping Human History in a telephone interview with me answered my question, "What do you say about using DNA as a tool for genealogy—to extend family history research?"

Does Steve Olson think DNA testing as a tool is useful to genealogists? What does Bryan Sykes, author of the best-selling, The Seven Daughters of Eve have to say? Sykes’s book has a very different opinion about DNA testing and genealogy/family history research. The two have opposite views. Numerous scientists comment.

Sykes is associated with Oxford Ancestors, the world's first company to harness the power and precision of modern DNA-based genetics for use in genealogy. The motto on the Oxford Ancestors Web site reads: “Putting the genes in genealogy.” Use these resources and easy to understand explanations for family history research.

Instead, one finds the author quoting from her correspondence with scientists about her own DNA test results. Most of the 'debate that unfolds' involves disagreements among those scientists about the meanings of her results.

I was particularly disappointed at how much wasted space there is in the book. Some 50 pages, for example, for a glossary of genetic terms reprinted from a US government agency paper, and 6 pages advertising the author's other (completely unrelated) books.

All of that is not to say that no one will find this book of use. Readers who approach it with the understanding that it was written by a layperson with no special training in genetics, who wrote it as an extension of a hobby, may be less disappointed than I was. But I would advise the prospective buyer to have a look at a copy at the library or a bookstore before making a purchase.


Don't waste your money   February 13, 2004
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

Poorly written, not on topic, duplications and very little substance. A huge disappointment. The title sounded like it would be a step by step outline to interpreting your DNA. It's anything but.


Why I like this book above all similar books   December 21, 2003
 1 out of 9 found this review helpful

I simply love this book because it was not written by a scientist writing to other scientists in hopes of trying to impress career credentials. This book was written by a nearly blind, hard-of-hearing woman who has never had a science course and who spends her days volunteering full time in a senior center helping others crochet blankets for the homeless. I know because as the college-age grandson of the author, I have watched the author in full-time volunteer service, read for the past five years in the field entirely on her own, in spite of all odds of decreasing vision and hearing and multiple disabilities overcome the stigma of having taken her graduate degree in English.

The author mentions this in the book, volunteering to help in battered women's shelters, in places where women like her, in their sixties and beyond, find reading independently in the sciences opens the floodgates of learning and sharing with others views on her beloved subjects--genealogy, nutrition, and reading about a variety of metabolic responses to nutrition, the study of ancestry and how archaeology and genetics interact. Grandma's goal was to inspire scientists to share information with one another in fields that normally don't communicate as often as they should.

Because grandma dared to write books based on her lifelong friendships, conversations, correspondences, and interviews with a wide variety of geneticists, scientists, family historians, and physicians, she has been literally put down for not having any credentials. Well, she does have an excellent community college teaching credential in language arts and literature, but, just by talking to scientists or writing to them and asking whether they would be interested in allowing her to compile their expertise into a book, has met with as you see, mixed reactions.

Just for behaving as a journalist has been called a no-no just because she is a woman with multiple physical disabilities, but a mind that yearns to read and inspire scientists to share with one another knowledge. You see, scientists don't share enough, and this book meant for the general consumer, opens the door to the resources for which the reader can then contact more experts in the various fields covered. That's why I loved this book. It dared to take a white haired lady with little mobility and a background of being a loving grandma to eight, and a person who has shared full-time volunteerism for a lifetime, and allow her to read in the sciences independently and then interview people to gain more expertise for the book, of which all material has been approved with blessings from those who volunteered in turn to share their knowledge. We are thankful to all.

Interestingly, my mom notes that in the seventies when Elaine Morgan wrote "Descent of Woman," she was called "just a housewife" by the scientists and her views on anthropology was rejected for more than 30 years until scientists finally invited her to a professional conference in South Africa to present her views on her anthropological theories. Times haven't changed. Here we have another similar woman on the mommy track, grandma, who for her love of reading anthropology and genetics books, also dared to write a book, and what do you get? The same type of reactions from people saying, go read a book written by scientists, not by my grandma who "spends her time crocheting blankets for the homeless" at senior centers.

When are we going to learn that it's perfectly okay to be a woman, over 60-something, with disabilities of vision and hearing, and still, like Hellen Keller, write a book on a beloved subject.

What would you recommend women like this do instead? Wouldn't you rather have a warm, fuzzy book where the author puts in a bit of her life history to share the human-ness of it all, in the book along with DNA expertise and genealogy resources? Or would you rather stick to the books written by men with degrees without the warm, woman's touch? Why must science be so utterly cold? Why can't it be warm and friendly like grandma? She's written other, much thicker in size books on DNA, genealogy, and nutrition also.

So I'd like to ask you to look at her last book--Find Your Personal Adam& Eve. The ISBN number is 0-595-30633-0. And thank you to the scientists who were willing to share and approve their information and their expertise with my grandma.

This perhaps will open doors so scientists will share information with one another. You see, the race for government funding often prevents scientists from sharing and communicating with one another as often as the consumer would like. Thank you for listening to a college student.


Worst DNA book ever - DON'T BUY IT!   June 17, 2003
 14 out of 15 found this review helpful

Just a heads-up warning: Anne Hart makes her living by writing "books that sell" not by writing on topics about which she is an expert, or even about topics with which she has sufficient experience. She lists her 30 most recent self-published books in the back of this one--and one of her titles was "Writing Books that Sell." Does this sound like a credible author to you?!

The title of this book is grossly misleading and in fact barely one page in 10 makes reference to legitimate scientific data--or even to the scientists who supposedly "speak out". Her research was poorly conducted and even more poorly analyzed. She spends several chapters on topics which have no business being including in this book--namely, "creating a scrapbook" (where one sentence out of pages of text refers to DNA), and "beginning genealogy research." In the latter, she repeatedly does those readers who haven't done any genealogy reserach, a great disservice by misdirecting them on methods of locating a woman's maiden name. She suggests ordering birth records. How, pray tell, does one order a birth record for a person whose maiden name is unknown?! Ask the county clerk for copies of every record of a child born on a given date? Please!

While I applaud the use of the Internet as a means of self-publishing, one should not use it as a shortcut around publishing in a professional manner. Within the first seven pages of text, I found a dozen errors (typographical, spelling, grammar, and punctuation), which even a blind (but not deaf) editor would catch. Ms. Hart's writing style leads one to believe she published the book as it was first written--a draft version in which no thought was given to logical chapter order (definitions and explanations of DNA and genes can be found somewhere around page 110). She spends five pages telling you, disjointedly, four different times how she was beaten up on a train just for her "ethnic appearance"--uh, why would readers care? We DON'T!

Please, do not ... [buy] this book. There is so little of value in it, and very little of use from the actual scientists, for whom I have the greatest respect. Instead, buy a book written by the actual scientists themselves--or at least someone with scientific credentials. Ms. Hart graciously states at one point that, "being 61 years old, I had choice of either spending my days crocheting at the senior center, or writing a book about DNA." She writes DNA detective stories--again self-published through iUniverse press. I'm sorry, but that's certainly not enough credentials for me! I plan to ask [Amazon.com] for refund.


Best book on how to interpret DNA test results   June 10, 2003
 0 out of 7 found this review helpful

This is by far the best book on how to interpret DNA test results for family history and ancestry. Also see the author's other books on various ethnic DNA, such as Ashkenazi and other groups. I use this book with my students because it has a dictionary of DNA terms at the back and a whole section on ancestry and DNA. This is part of a four-book series on DNA for beginners by the author and is outstandingly the best book on the subject because it goes into detail on ethnic DNA. I highly recommend it to my beginning students in molecular genealogy, oral history, genealogy, and DNA/human genetics studies as well as anthropology. A book understandable by all ages and levels of background.