24 January 2008

Where has your DNA been?

Inspired by some US genealogy bloggers listing where their ancestors were 100 and 200 years ago, to the left see a depiction of where my ancestors were living. Using the My Maps feature of Google Maps makes it almost too easy to produce.

Purple pins are for 1808, the blue for 1908.

My ancestors liked to move around. The only place with pins of both colours, hard to see, is London, England.

Two of the westernmost purple pins are the locations of my Y- and Mitochondrial DNA.

If you see things broad brush, my ancestors were in Western Europe and those two commonly analysed DNA components are a fair representation of my overall genetic origin, at the time.

If you look at details, and most genealogists do, the map illustrates the limitations of state of the art DNA analysis for genealogy.

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