Friday, April 5, 2019

New Matches

This has been a bumper week for DNA matches at all of the sites (and I have tested at most of them - FT DNA, National Genographic, Ancestry, 23 and Me, Living DNA and uploaded results to My Heritage). I am finding that I write fewer and fewer letters to people that I match. Having so many known cousins tested and my grandparents DNA phased (although this does get revised) and for the most part this has worked well, I can usually place people who match me in a largish way (i.e. more than 25 cM) now given their matches and where they are matching me. To be honest there are not enough hours in the day to write to all the people I am now matching but a lot of them feel that way as well I suspect.

Where will DNA take us? I wonder that sometimes. I like the idea of doing a genome at birth and I could live with a chip being inserted. I can see a lot of value in doing that. Who would maintain the information is perhaps initially a sticking point but lets face it we have all of our other information stored in one government database or another what would it matter if the government stores yet another one. What are they going to use it for anyway other than to identify us. It is a slippery slope though in some ways I am able to see that but at 73 I am perhaps not thinking that far into the future.

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