My dna matches does not match my family tree

The samples come from some databases to which all scientists have access, and the companies may also collect their own. The companies compare customers' DNA samples to samples they have from people around the world who have lived in a certain area for generations. That is also why siblings can have different ancestry results.

'When we talk about the 50 percent that gets inherited from Mom, there's a chance that you have a recombination that just gave you more of the northwest European part than the Italian part of your Mom's ancestry DNA,' she says. But Elissa Levin, a genetic counselor and the director of policy and clinical affairs of Helix, says a process called recombination means that each egg and each sperm carries a different mix of a parent's genes. We do have the genes we inherit - 50 percent from each parent. I also learned that even though I got half my genes from Mom, they may not mirror hers. 'But resolving that same difference between one part of East Asia and another part of East Asia is much more difficult.'

'Resolving a difference between, say, an African genome and an East Asian genome would be easy,' he says. This, Chakravarti says, is likely true because the genetics of people on a continental level are so different, and it's not likely South Asian is going to look like European. My 23andMe test also showed less than 1 percent of South Asian, Sub-Saharan African, and East Asian & Native American. So, he says, these tests 'would be most accurate at the level of continental origins, and as you go to higher and higher resolution, they would become less and less accurate.'ДЄs in my case - the results got me to Europe, just not Italy. But the ways the companies analyze the genes leave lots of room for interpretation. The science for analyzing one's genome is good, Chakravarti says. 'But it may still be in the limits of error that these methods have.' 'That's surprising,' he told us when we showed him the results. Aravinda Chakravarti of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, who has spent his career studying genetics and human health. To answer this question, Mom and I drove up to Baltimore to visit Dr. But how could I have an Italian grandmother and almost no Italian genes? And the Italian? Mom had 11.3 percent to my 1.6. But Mom came back as 25 percent southern European, me only 6 percent. This time, I at least had a category for southern Europe. We opened our results together and were just as surprised. We decided to get a second opinion and sent away to another company, 23andMe. How could I have 50 percent of Mom's DNA and not have any Italian? We do look alike, and she says there is little chance we were switched at birth. But my Helix results didn't even have an 'Italy and Southern European' category. That made sense because of her Italian mother. Mom's results: 31 percent from Italy and Southern Europe. Last fall, we sent away to get our DNA tested by Helix, the company that works with National Geographic. They moved to Canada about a decade before my grandmother was born in 1909. Her father was French Canadian, and her mother (my namesake, Gisella D'Appollonia) was born of Italian parents.

But retired history professors never really retire, so she has been researching her family's migrations, through both paper records and now a DNA test.

My mom, Carmen Grayson, taught history for 45 years, high school and college, retiring from Hampton University in the late 1990s. While we get half our genes from each parent, a process called recombination means that each egg and each sperm carries a different mix of the genes from each. If your experience is anything like that of me and my mom, you may find surprises - not the dramatic 'switched at birth' kind, but results that are really different from what you expected. You've sent off your awkwardly-collected saliva sample, and you're awaiting your results. Maybe you got one of those find-your-ancestry kits over the holidays.

My dna matches does not match my family tree