Comment on Bit harsh?

• mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to follow your heritage.

  I do have Welsh ancestry it’s helped me dig into, but I mostly did it because of my love for Arthurian legend. Wanted to learn more about it and in the process came across stuff in Welsh and just went down a rabbit hole and never stopped.

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  • lokalhorst@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely respect following your interests for whatever reason. It’s nice you found something that inspires you! It’s just that as a European it’s kind of a stereotype that US Americans try to find their roots via DNA genealogy tests to find out they are 15% Irish and claim they have a deep connection to Guiness beer. These tests are mostly bullshit, but somehow it’s kind of a trend in the US for whatever reason. Again, I appreciate people being enthusiastic things, sorry if I came over too harsh.

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    • mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah, the topic comes up quite often in the Welsh learners server I’m in (obviously full of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh people). It gets pretty heated going both ways, some annoyed by “culture thieves”, others glad people are learning.

      I wouldn’t say the tests are bullshit. Some of the marketing for sure but the science behind them is sound. The problem is most people don’t really take the time to understand it at all and what it really means.

      The reasons behind it being a trend are quite complex, probably beyond the scope of a Lemmy comment lol.

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      • lokalhorst@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        On the surface the DNA tests seem to be useful but if you look deeper into it, you will see that they are absolutely unscientific. It is just that the companies behind them, that are interested in getting your DNA, are just very good at marketing. In the US there is a very widespread trend of wanting to know your ancestry. Your modern history starts in the late 18th century, Europe seems to be so old and diverse, and I absolutely get the fascination. In fact, I am a hobby genealogist myself. I have researched almost 1,000 ancestors (not direct, also brothers and sisters). Some lines go as far as 1680, many are dead end around 1800, others are still waiting to be researched. For these results I have looked through thousands of church book pages, I visited smaller and bigger archives, I traveled through the country and paid money for census copies; as my approach is to have a primary source for each and every life event a person had. Similar to your motivation it started out in an interest of where I come from. But I soon noticed that beyond my greats grandparents the people become really irrelevant and I feel not connection to them. For my identity, it doesn’t really matter where these people came from. However, I use them to dig into the historical contexts they lived in. You get to know a lot about small villages and unimportant events in history you would have never heard of before. This is what actually fascinates me, similar to how some welsh myths or whatever fascinate you. But let’s get back to the DNA tests - why do I call them bullshit? Because they mostly are. It’s not the molecular biology that is not far enough, it is the reference DNA these tests are using. It is possible to identity your ancestry on a continental level with these tests. In rare cases it might be even possible to say something like “eastern European”, but most of the time this will be insignificant. Most importantly though, reading that you are 15% welsh is just bullshit. Even if had the reference DNA of these populations - what are these populations even? What is an ethnicity? If you look at European history from the middle ages to the modern age, you will see that it is almost impossible to make out an “ethnicity”. Just look at how the European population changed between 1618 and 1648 during the 30 year war, or how the Holy Roman Empire changed it borders throughout the centuries. In modern historic research, scientists are much more careful with the term “ethnicity”, as the populations that are talked about were mostly made up in the 18th and 19the century during the development of national states in Europe.

        I really, really recommend to read this blog article about DNA genealogy and what you can expect from it, to get an idea of how useful the results are you are getting. It’s a very comprehensive summary of what is wrong with DNA testing in the US.

        dna-explained.com/…/ethnicity-testing-a-conundrum…

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