Sideview DNA

I received a notice recently about a new type of DNA analysis that is now available for DNA which is submitted to ancestry.com. This is called “Sideview DNA” and is done by splitting each DNA sample down the middle, comparing the strands of proteins to others in their database and giving you an estimate of how your DNA is broken down in each half – essentially giving you a perspective of the breakdown of your parent’s DNA even though your parents may not have submitted a sample for testing. For those, like myself, where my parents have passed on, this is something that I would not be able to have otherwise. Here is an explanation of how it works.

There are some obvious limitations to this as even their first example shows in that when you get “half” of each of your parent’s DNA, that half may over-represent or under-represent the percentage breakdown in the DNA being “halved”. I’ve seen that in my own DNA where mine appears to be 18% Ashkenazi Jewish when the theoretical percentage would be 12.5% as the only Jewish ancestor I have is a single great-grandfather.

But I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to look at the DNA results for both myself and my wife and see how much I could match up to our family trees (I’ve done both our trees back to their immigrant ancestors as much as possible). Since the majority of both our lines goes back to England during the Great Migration of 1620-1640, I was primarily looking for any ancestors who did not fit that characteristic and what percentage of our DNA we could attribute to them (grandparent=25%, great-grandparent=12.5%, great-grandparent=6.25%, etc.) Here are my results.

[DNA Analysis]

 

Overall Comments

Ancestry does not look at family trees when they do this analysis. Since the two halves of your DNA are not identified as to whether they came from your mother or your father, they are simply labeled “parent 1” and “parent 2”. They do give some hints on how one can make this parent assignment and in my case it is pretty obvious. All the European Jewish is from my one great-grandfather. An in my wife’s case it’s also pretty easy to determine as her mother’s grandparents were the ones from Germany. Thus, in the above chart, I have labeled the columns with F% (father’s percentage) and M% (mother’s percentage).

The percentages on the left are as reported by ancestry. The ones on the right are the theoretical ones based on exact attribution as noted above (grandparent=25%, great-grandparent=12.5%, etc.). I’ve rounded each so the percentages are 25/13/6/3/2/1 and continued using rounding up to 1 for the more distant ancestors instead of using a zero.

You will notice that there are three cells which are labeled “unknown” and which I have colored orange. These are instances where I have not been able to identify the individual/individuals in my family tree who can be assigned to that country/DNA group. Scattered among the few thousand identified ancestors in my and my wife’s family tree are about 30 or so “brick walls” where I have not been able to trace the ancestry back any further. I suspect that the eventual resolution of these “unknown” markings would be found behind those brick walls. But out of a total of 200% (100 for myself and 100 for my wife), having unknowns which account for only 10% is not too bad and I’ll accept the results as I have them thus far.

Next, let’s look at the breakdown/identification for each of my parents and parents-in-law.

 

My Father – Vernon Russell

The breakdown here is almost exactly as expected. In amongst all my ancestors there are only three who are not of English heritage. These are:

·        Maurice Levy – born in the US, but to parents who were both Ashkenazi Jews who came here from England a few years earlier.

·        Nancy Soan – my great-great-grandmother who was from Ireland

·        Robert Russell – the original Russell in my family line. I had him assigned as being from Scotland, not only because there is a Russell clan there, but because of the timing where he would have been fleeing Scotland in the late 1740s following the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charles. This sideview DNA analysis is definitely supportive of my conjecture.

 

My Mother – Sylvia [Pierpont]

This breakdown is also pretty much as expected. There are four instances of non-English ancestors:

·        Sarah Few – she emigrated here from England, but upon further investigation both her parents were from Ireland.

·        There are several individuals who were from Scotland who collectively make up the 8% of Scottish DNA on this side of my family.

·        Cyrus Johnson – while I do not have immigration documents for him, the name Johnson is the only Scandinavian name in this part of my family tree and is thus the only solution I see to this Norwegian DNA. There are a number of brick walls in this part of the tree that I will continue to investigate.

·        As noted above, there are a number of brick walls in my family tree. I have not yet been able to find any Germanic ancestors. It’s possible that there are some non-Jewish ancestors in amongst my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors, but that does not seem likely either – and finding them in European records would be difficult if not impossible.

 

My Father-in-law – Charles VanDeCar

Like with my father, things seem to line up pretty well here with ancestors at the right level to account for a pretty good match between my wife’s DNA and the family tree I have built for her. Only a few comments needed:

·        There is one German ancestor on her father’s side, David Sicklesteel, whose DNA is not found in the analysis. As I stated above, this is entirely a possibility when DNA is passed on from one generation to the next. If anything, this is confirmation of just how DNA passing works. But his name is shaded on the analysis to illustrate this.

·        As I have noted in an earlier posting, the VanDeCar name appears to not have come from a Dutch family, but from a Scottish line where some family members had briefly moved to the Netherlands before coming to America with the Dutch in the 1630s. This DNA analysis is just further confirmation of that since there are no traces of Dutch DNA in this side of the family.

 

 My Mother-in-law – Mary [Wright]

Once again, everything seems to line up pretty nicely between the DNA split and what I have documented in this part of my wife’s family tree. Again, I have just two comments:

·        Like with my mother’s line, there are a number of brick walls in this part of my wife’s tree. Here they seem to be hiding two portions of her DNA – a small piece from Scotland and a larger piece from Sweden/Denmark. The former was not something that I was aware of before, as I had believed that all the Scottish portion was attributable to my father-in-law, but now there appears to be some on my mother-in-law’s side as well.

·        Although my wife’s great-grandparents were both from the same area of Europe, they are from different DNA groups. Her great-grandmother, Annie Addis, was of German background. But as I noted in an earlier posting, the original spelling of Cincush was Czenkusch which is of eastern European, not German, background.

 

Conclusions

I had done a sanity check of my DNA results against my family tree a few years ago (see here). But the availability of this sideview analysis has enabled me to get more specific and try to identify the specific family members who contributed DNA from these various regions. While it is not perfect, owing both to the way that DNA is passed on as well as to the presence of several brick walls in my research, there are no obvious surprises.

In particular, I am pleased to have confirmation of (1) the Russell line being from Scotland, (2) the VanDeCar line being from Scotland, and (3) the Cincush/Czenkusch line being from eastern Europe. It has also given me renewed energy to try and break through all those brick walls to see if I can find solutions to the “unknowns” in my analysis.