Tag: ancestry

  • My Irish Heritage

    My Irish Heritage

    This week began with Saint Patrick’s Day, a day that here in the States celebrates Ireland and Irish heritage. And I have an abundance of that. As we saw in a post earlier this year about some new genetic ancestry results, Ireland accounts for approximately 2/3 of my ancestry. But as many of my readers…

  • A Refreshed Look at My Ethnic Heritage

    A Refreshed Look at My Ethnic Heritage

    Late last week I received an update on my ethnic breakdown from My Heritage, a competitor of Ancestry.com and other genealogy/family history/genetic ancestry companies. For many years, the genealogical community had been waiting for this long-promised update. And it has finally arrived. For my money, My Heritage’s older analysis, v0.95, did not align with my…

  • No Matter What You Say, I’m Still Me

    No Matter What You Say, I’m Still Me

    As many long-time readers know, I was long ago bitten by the genealogy bug and that included me taking several DNA tests. The real value remains in the genetic matches, less so the ethnicity estimates. But the estimates are fun, I’ll give you that. Every so often the companies update their analysis of the DNA…

  • Updated DNA Ethnicity Estimates

    Earlier this year I posted a short piece that compared my DNA ethnicity estimates provided by a few different companies to each other. Ethnicity estimates are great cocktail party conversations, but not terribly useful to people doing serious genealogy research. They are highly dependent upon the available data from reference populations. To put it another…

  • Update on Tiffany

    Last month on another Friday I shared some graphics from a video by CCP Grey that looked at the origin and history of the name Tiffany. It’s a great video and I highly recommend it. But last week he published…an addendum I guess you could call it. The piece takes a look at a research…

  • Tiffany

    Happy Friday, all. We made it through another week of Covid, vaccinations, asteroids, and all that pleasant stuff. So let’s end with an upbeat note. Over on YouTube there’s a channel I have long enjoyed, CCP Grey, who creates videos about, well lots of things, but sometimes really interesting historical, geographical, and political topics. This…

  • Biden’s English Ancestry Revisited

    Last week I posted about an article in the BBC on the English ancestry of American president Joe Biden. And these types of article are a bit pro forma, famous person has an article about their personal ancestry with a family tree attached. Interestingly, this article did not, just the timeline I mentioned and a…

  • Biden’s English Ancestry

    We all know Joe Biden as the Irish American president. And that’s no malarkey. But, go back far enough in your family tree and you may find some interesting ancestry and ethnic origins and that’s no different with Joe Biden. Keep in mind that our number of ancestors doubles every generation. You have four grandparents,…

  • Difficult Descendancy Charts

    The holiday break is over as your author has burned up all his remaining time for 2020 and so now we’re back to work. And that means attempting to return to a more frequent and regular posting schedule for Coffeespoons. I wanted to start with the death of Diego Maradona, a legendary Argentinian footballer. He…

  • Where Is That Pesky Mason–Dixon Line?

    It’s no big secret that genealogy and family history are two of my big interests and hobbies. Consequently, on rainy days I sometimes like to enjoy an episode or two of Who Do You Think You Are (I prefer the UK version, but the American one will do too) or Finding Your Roots. So I…