New Feature: myOrigins Chromosome Painter on Family Tree DNA

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 This update is pretty great! FTDNA blogged about it here: https://blog.familytreedna.com/new-feature-myorigins-chromosome-painter-for-family-finder/ and have produced three short videos explaining how to make use of their work in your own research, how they produced the 90 population groups, and how they made the chromosome painter as accurate as possible. About 20 minutes each, these are well-worth your time if you have a Family Finder kit on Family Tree DNA, and you care at all about admixture, which is looking at possible origins of your ancestral DNA.


Example - father

At first look, my father's kit is completely boring: 92.5% Western Europe. However, 21 of the 22 chromosomes on top are 100% Western Europe; on chromosome 1, there is a small segment on both chromatids that is identified as Finnish. 


Ted Cowan's Chromosome 1 FTDNA ChromoPainter


Since my grandfather is 100% Scottish and my grandmother about 100% Swedish (on paper, at least) this is interesting. About half of my Cowan grandfather's ancestry is lowland Scots, and about half highland - very close Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and Viking ships from the Baltic through the North Sea. In this map, Scotland has a large arrow to the highlands and an arrow point to the lowlands. 




This analysis leads me to believe that my grandmother's contribution to his DNA is the bottom and more varied chromatid, while his father Thomas Cowan gave him the top and far more homogeneous one. 


Example - uncle and me

My mother never DNA tested; she died in 2001. However, her brother did, and his painted chromosome is completely, 100% Western Europe, which leads me to believe that hers would have said the same thing. Much like my father's chromosome painting, on 21 of the 22 chromosomes, the top chromatid is Western Europe, with that one exception. Mine is on chromosome 6, and is a small segment shared on both chromatids for Eastern Europe. The overall prediction for me is 4.5% Eastern Europe; all the other segments are on the lower chromatid. Is that from my mother, or my father? How I wish we had been able to test more of my mother's siblings, and all my grandparents!


Valorie Zimmerman's chromosome 6, with Eastern European shared segments


Example - husband and brother-in-law

Finally, my husband's chromosome painting is rather monochromatic as well, with a few tiny surprises sprinkled over the lower chromatid. He's 98.6% Western Europe, with the rest Southern Europe, possibly the Italian Peninsula. I have not yet seen this in his tree, which is partly back to Europe. However, the Romans were in Europe for many centuries. His brother Ron is almost identical, with 94.7% Western Europe and 5.3% Southern Europe. The image shows what clicking on one of the segments shows. All of the segment information can be downloaded as a CSV file which can then be imported into a spreadsheet or DNA Painter for comparison with other matches not on FTDNA.


Ron Zimmerman's Chromosome 9, showing one of the popups


Fish in all the ponds!

If you have tested your autosomal DNA at another testing company, it is free to upload to FTDNA. However, if you want access to tools like the new MyOrigins tool, it costs $19 to unlock the tools. While FTDNA does not have the largest database, it does have tools and capabilities that the other testing companies do not have. If you have the time and interest to "fish in all the ponds," upload!


Contrasting example - 23andMe

PS: I decided to look at my results from 23andMe to contrast the results, which was quite interesting. Here are my two overall admixture results side-by-side:


FtDNA                                                           23andMe

It's so interesting that while FTDNA finds 4.5% East Slavic, and 23andMe does not, 23andMe finds 0.6% Sardinian, and FTDNA does not. It's all in the reference populations they use to make their comparisons!

Valorie Zimmerman, part Sardinian per 23andMe


Valorie Cowan Zimmerman








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