My DNA tests confirm I'm from Earth

So my grandfather was indulgent enough to allow me to scrape the inside of his cheek for DNA several months ago. I think he thought it was a lot of hooey, but it was harmless enough. I waited with baited breath for my results and I have them!

And I have NO idea what any of it means! :-)

I had figured I was a smart enough person, I'd be able to figure it all out, but honestly, I know I have information there, and I just have no idea how to interpret it. I'm still very glad I have it and I'd do the swab and cough up the money for the results again in a second, I just wish I was a scientist who understood it all!

So what do I know now?

Well, when it comes to the Y-DNA, which I tend to refer to as "boy-DNA", I am told that my grandfather's DNA belongs to Y-DNA Haplogroup R1a1. WooHoo, a fact! I love facts. Apparently it confirmed positive for the sub-clade of M198, whatever that means.

I looked up haplogroup R1a1 on wikipedia and it explained that this is the y-chromosome found most frequently in central and eastern Europe, and in some areas of Central and south Asia.

This happily matches my grandfather's presumed heritage of his family coming to the US from Hungary (the area is in modern Romania). Further on that, his family had supposedly moved south to Hungary, probably in the late 1700s, early 1800s from the Alsace-Lorraine region. That is what my grandfather says he was always told. There was in fact, a large migration of Germans south into the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Hapsburgs had encouraged German emigration to unsettled areas of Southern Hungary in the 18th century.

So all that makes sense and matches family legend, which is very gratifying.

The company I used also looked in their database to see if the boy-dna matched anyone else in their database. I didn't get a significant number for a match, but more eastern european confirmation - their were non-significant matches to people in modern-day Bulgaria and Slovakia.

I did the 67-marker test, but did not have any matches with the same or similar surname. This was not surprising to me, my grandfather's surname is not widely occurring.

When it comes to girl-DNA (or mtDNA), I am told that my grandfather has the mtDNA haplogroup H, which is the most common mtDNA haplogroup for Europe.

There are lots of forums out there I know, for posting your DNA test results and finding others that match, I'm looking into those and figuring out which one's to bother with. I will let you know how it goes!