#ancestry dot com

[persephinae]

hey umm... hope none of you did DNA tracking with Ancestry.com

sources: x, x

not sure why it's only being heard about now, 3 years later, or maybe i just missed that terrifying news

[normal-loaf-of-bread]

When I was in AP biology, a bunch of students kept asking the teacher to let us do the strawberry DNA lab (where you extract DNA from a strawberry). The teacher kept saying no because, according to him, all that lab teaches you is that DNA looks like snot. He was like “what would we even do with the strawberry DNA?” And someone suggested that we send it to 23 And Me and I think about that a lot

[periodicallychanging-blog]

[spankerella]

@ MyVictorianNightmare

[restingbitchlifestyle]

So this ancestry dot com app is bad. It really feels like they gamified genealogy. Like I have to log on every day and look for new hints in solving the mystery of these people in my past. And unlocking new sections of the family tree. My boss says it gets wild when the dna results finally come in.

But also 1. I’m shocked by how long my family has been in the US. My father’s family immigrated in the 1950s. The most recent immigration in my mother’s family is 1850 and the next one before that is 1750. Like we’re going back to Jamestown and the Mayflower probably.

And 2. There’s a very clear baby boom after the civil war. Suddenly families are enormous and have a lot of surviving children and if someone is widowed they remarry and have more kids. I’m finding people with 20 kids accumulated from three marriages including step-kids. Before the civil war families are much smaller with only one or two kids surviving to be listed in the parent’s will. Part of this is probably because of improvements in medicine, abortion became taboo, and there was an idea that it was necessary to repopulate after all the death in the war.

But also 3. There’s a lot of clearly non-white people claiming to be white. In the 1800’s there were a lot of very good reasons to pass for white if there was any possibility you could. I’m looking at clearly indigenous ancestors that probably started calling themselves white to avoid having their land stolen. And also clearly Black ancestors just above the Mason-Dixon Line claiming to be white to avoid slavery and have access to buying land and owning a business. There were “one drop” laws that if you had any ancestry at all that was not white you were legally not white and could be stripped of property and rights according to the law at the time. Also interracial marriage was illegal so both spouses had to identify as the same race whether or not that was their actual racial background.

And finally 4. I think a lot of white Americans feel culturally lost because we don’t have the same sort of bright cultural traditions as other people. But that’s really just because those cultural traditions are such a contrast to the standard American culture we’re so immersed in constantly. I have a strong sense of my Polish-American culture and identity but not really anything from my mother’s family. My mother’s family is just so damn American that our culture is the standard. I was hoping to find more clearly ethnic ancestry there but it’s all just extremely ethnically American. There are lot of Ozark and Appalachian people and those are some distinct cultures so that’s interesting.

[what-marsha-eats]

[the-lorax-mustache]

How to find how you are related to other people on someone else's Ancestry.com tree that is shared with you.

I had to figure this out on my own because Ancestry.com tech support articles suck, and I thought I would share in case this comes up in search results. I know Reddit would be better for SEO, but from what I hear Redditt is not really functional right now.

Anyway:

Go to your name on the top right

Go to account settings

Go to trees (on the left side menu)

Go to trees shared with you

Click the arrow to open settings for that tree

Set “who you are in this tree”

After you do that, when you search for anyone in that tree the relationship explanation on their profile will be how they are related to you.

You can then click on that explanation and it will give you the whole chain of people

[goingplacesfarandnear]

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