Who’s yer Mama?

Gen just wasn’t 100% certain, so we gathered some teething drool and did a little check with 23andMe. Lo and behold — Luna is her daughter! Big relief all around.

And we learned some cool details about her lineage: about 40% of her genes are of Eastern European origin and 6% Finnish (thanks to me), and from her mom, Luna is ~20% Irish (grandma) and 27% Ashkenazi Jewish (grandpa). She has no Ukraininan DNA even though that is grandpa’s country of origin. You can see the accumulated effects of historical breeding patterns in the DNA distribution: Ashkenazi Jew is the only cluster that is independent of geography. In other words, an analysis of humanity’s genetic variation from eons of local inter-breeding shows clustering by geography, but with negligible inter-mixing with the Ashkenazi population. So, even though grandpa is from the Ukraine, he has no genes in common with non-Jewish Ukrainians.

The percentages in the two left columns add up to ~50% each of Luna’s total genetic lineage by geography. Note that the 27% Ashkenazi is also entirely from the Ukraine (maternal grandfather), but no Ukrainian geo-genes are present.

And the ancestry timeline is accurate for the date of the most recent native-born from each source country: 1940 for my Estonian parents who fled the Soviet occupation and Gen’s Ashkenazi grandfather from the Ukraine, and ~1915 for Gen’s Irish grandfather.