{"id":8215,"date":"2018-12-29T17:44:06","date_gmt":"2018-12-29T17:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/?p=8215"},"modified":"2018-12-29T17:44:06","modified_gmt":"2018-12-29T17:44:06","slug":"dna-tests-shoes-and-beer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/?p=8215","title":{"rendered":"DNA Tests, Shoes, and Beer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s advertising. Plain and simple.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The ethnicity estimates are a way for\u00a0<em>AncestryDNA<\/em>\u00a0to market their tests.\u00a0 It&#8217;s marketing. It&#8217;s also how shoes and beer are sold. If you think it is a stretch to make beer &#8220;sexy,&#8221; try doing that for ethnicity results.<\/li>\n<li>The ethnicity estimates are not for your &#8220;immediate&#8221; ancestors, but for dozens of generations (at the very least) before the present day. They don&#8217;t tell you where great-grandpa emigrated from no matter what the advertising says. Those shoes don&#8217;t really make you sexy either.<\/li>\n<li>You may locate new first cousins, half-siblings, or uncles\/aunts that were the result of a &#8220;short-term&#8221; relationship.\u00a0 So maybe that marketing for the beer and shoes did actually work at some point in time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong. Sometimes the ethnicity estimates are accurate (they do have some limited uses) and sometimes &#8220;new&#8221; relatives are welcomed with open arms. But sometimes they are not.<\/p>\n<p>Remember that all the &#8220;DNA ads&#8221; are to get people to make a purchase&#8211;just like ads for anything else.<\/p>\n<p>The upside of the ads is that more people test&#8211;and that may help you solve genealogical problems even if those testers don&#8217;t have trees and don&#8217;t respond to your inquiries. Non-responsive test takers with no trees frustrate me as well, but at least they are another test to sort through.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s advertising. Plain and simple. The ethnicity estimates are a way for\u00a0AncestryDNA\u00a0to market their tests.\u00a0 It&#8217;s marketing. It&#8217;s also how shoes and beer are sold. If you think it is a stretch to make beer &#8220;sexy,&#8221; try doing that for ethnicity results. The ethnicity estimates are not for your &#8220;immediate&#8221; ancestors, but for dozens of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}