Ancestry

For my birthday, Carl gave me a DNA testing kit and subscription to Ancestry.com (I had indicated an interest in doing a DNA test). He gave it to me when we were on our Alaska trip, and I sent in the "vial of spit" from Fairbanks. I got the test results back a few weeks ago. I've also been on Ancestry.com looking at information about my family tree. I'm not sure exactly why I wanted to get the DNA test done, and there have not been any life-changing results (unlike for some friends and family of ours), but I am grateful that he got me this for my birthday!

Ancestry DNA kit

I didn't have any exact way to figure out which of my parents are parent 1 and parent 2, but I assigned Parent 1 to my Dad and Parent 2 to my Mom, and the cousins who have also done the DNA test (a first cousin on my Mom's side and a first cousin once removed on my Dad's side) were designated correctly as maternal and paternal, so I guess it is assigned correctly.

One of the things that the output of the test provided were traits that may be predicted from DNA. Some of them were accurate for me, and some were not... here are a few that I pulled out:

The asparagus odor trait is not correct -- I didn't even know that there was such a thing until Carl and I got married, and he is able to smell and I am NOT. However, I *do* dislike cilantro, so that was on target.

I think I'm pretty competitive, but I also enjoy dancing (right on one, wrong on one).

My ring finger is longer than my index finger so wrong on this one.

I am not a very good goal setter (I hated the discussions at IBM on "what do you want to be when you grow up?"), I definitely have thin hair strands (though I have a lot of them), and I do not tolerate heat well (I have about a 1 degree F comfort range between too hot and too cold) - so all of these were correct.

I have no ability to make contact with a ball - another correct.

I am more of a morning person, but I am very likely to have a pet. I am definitely less physically flexible -- I recall when we were celebrating my Granny's 90th birthday and she demonstrated that she could touch her toes -- I was in my 30s and could not (and really was not even flexible when I was in middle-to-high school and had to do gymnastics in gym class) -- so two correct and one wrong.

All of these are correct for me.

And these are also correct.

In all, they provided information on 77 traits -- I was surprised that these would be predictable by DNA. I think the data is collected by testing lots of people's DNA, and asking them questions -- with a large enough data sample, I guess they can start making reasonable guesses as to the predictability of certain traits.