LOOKING FOR YOUR ROOTS?
For Asians, blacks and Latinos, genealogical DNA tests don’t tell the whole story
SAN FRANCISCO – Family history DNA tests are pegged to be hugely popular gifts this Christmas – but are they worth it if you’re one of the 30 percent or so of Americans with ancestors who didn’t come from Europe? ❚ Today, the answer is a qualified maybe. People of color generally aren’t going to get the same specificity of ethnicity estimates as white Americans, though the results are slowly getting more precise for those with ancestors from African, Asia and the Americas. Even so, experts suggest collecting DNA from your oldest relatives now, wherever they come from, because one day it’s going to be a genealogical gold mine.
Kalani Mondoy, whose family is part native Hawaiian, ran straight into that particular brick wall when trying to track his mother’s side of the family. Paper records didn’t get him very far.
“In the case of Hawaiians, it’s a lot of oral history. The documentation came later,” he said from Los Angeles where he works as a tax consultant.
He next turned to a genealogical DNA test, which was less helpful than he’d hoped.
At the time his family did the test on Ancestry.com in 2015, the company had just 18 Polynesian people in its genetic reference panel. Compare that with France, which today has 1,407.
The size of that reference database matters. The more samples available, the better the tests can pinpoint where your ancestors came from. Most of the companies initially used Europeancentric samples because those were the easiest to get and because that’s where many of their customers’ ancestors came from.
But not all.
And the proportion of people with non-European ancestry buying the tests is increasing every year. That in turn is causing the heavily Euro-centric companies to scramble to add people from Africa, Asia and the Americas to their reference panels, the groups of people whose DNA is used to establish baseline ethnicities.
They’re all looking for people who have four grandparents from an underrepresented part of the world, genetically speaking, so they can include their DNA in those reference panels and deepen their pool of connections.
Even so, every company aimed at a general audience has a way to go. Ancestry.com is the only one that publishes a listing of how many people it has in its reference panels for each region. As of November, its Germanic Europe panel included 2,072 people, while there
“While courthouses can burn down and records can be lost, the DNA is still there and it keeps track of your history.”
Phillip Goff genetic genealogy consultant
were just 65 from Western and Central India and 41 from Northern Africa.
In the end, it took DNA and hard research for Mondoy to unravel the mystery of who his biological grandfather was, after his mom told the family she was adopted.
That included more than 50 hours in the library going through dozens of rolls of microfilm for days on end, and the discovery of a second cousin through DNA matching.
“His mother and my mother were first cousins. When I found the potential mother of my mother, she looked just like my mom,” he said.
Mondoy’s family has taken multiple DNA tests, including AncestryDNA, 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA. None yet provide the depth he’d like. Early on he was told that 11 percent of Ancestry’s Polynesian samples showed some Scandinavian background, but it was from one single person several generations ago who ended up being in the family of all the 18 people whose samples were included.
“Their databases have more people of European descent because that’s who’s been tested,” he said, though he does allow that things improving. “Polynesians are now up to 28 in the Ancestry database!”
His story illustrates a conundrum for those looking to trace their non-European roots. Genealogical DNA tests compare hundreds of thousands of locations on a person’s genome with databases of known DNA samples, giving customers information about what population groups their ancestors likely came from.
The results can be very powerful. Today, professional genealogists almost always include DNA analysis in their work because it can provide not only a deep look at where someone’s ancestors came from, but potential matches with other, though often distant, family members that can help trace lineages.
“While courthouses can burn down and records can be lost, the DNA is still there and it keeps track of your history,” said Phillip Goff, a genetic genealo- gy consultant in Davidson, North Carolina.
Uncovering the past
Of course, for many Americans, there were never any records to begin with.
“As African-Americans, we have a distinct challenge in terms of tracing our ancestry, because slavery is a research brick wall,” said Andre Kearns, a genealogist and marketing executive in Washington, D.C.
His wife is from Haiti, but genealogy DNA tests helped him uncover her family connection to Lisa Fanning, an African-American genealogist with ancestry from Wilkes County, Georgia.
Fanning’s historical research uncovered French slave trader Louis Prudhomme, who escaped the Haitian Revolution for Wilkes County where he began importing enslaved Haitians. DNA helped to reveal their family connection, which would have otherwise remained invisible in the historical record.
Kearns also found a very distant genetic match his father shares with a woman who lives in Cameroon.
“What that tells me is that we probably share an ancestor from the early 18th century and her ancestors stayed in Cameroon and my ancestors were sold into the slave trade,” he said.
Someone with German roots might have found a horde of second and third cousins – at least one of whom was sure to have researched detailed family trees going back to the 16th and 17th centuries. An African-American might find only genetic traces showing their ancestors had originally been from the part of Africa that is now Ghana.
Choosing a DNA test
It’s impossible to name one test that’s best for everyone with non-European ancestry because all are constantly updating their panels and their algorithms. While one might be better for Asian-Americans one year, another could increase the number of people on its reference panels for Latin America and come out ahead the next.
The good news is that once you’ve taken a test, the companies continue to compare your DNA data to their newlyenlarged reference panels, sending updated reports every couple of years.