I’ve been asked how we got started on this quest. As all such stories should go, it starts with, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Two people walk into a bar\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
In the spring of 2010 my son, David, was in a Toronto bar with his girlfriend Angella. They were discussing finding an appropriate birthday present for her father.<\/p>\n
While surfing the net on a friends web-enabled phone they discovered that 23andMe was offering DNA testing for both medical and genealogical results for $99 down from $495. The offer expired in 20 minutes. They bought one for her father and David also bought one for himself since he had been asking \u00e2\u20ac\u0153who am I?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d largely motivated by the identity-hole left by his great-grandfather, one that David had unsuccessfully tried to fill.<\/p>\n
When his results came back he had no time to check them since he was out of town for two months and had recently decided to do his PhD in Sweden and they had to be there in two months. So he gave curious me access to his file. After a week or so of poking around I stumbled across a MacCallum web site devoted to genealogical DNA research. Hundreds of McCallums (McCallan etc) on it were <\/strong>people with only<\/strong> versions of haplotype R. None were versions of our E. We didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t belong. Then I checked for other sites related to E1b1b1c1a. Low and behold we came from the Levant (near Abraham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Harran) around 1515 BCE\u00c2\u00a0 (+\/-650 years).<\/p>\n It was like waking up on a foreign hotel room and not know which way was home. Completely disorienting\u00e2\u20ac\u201dfor days.\u00c2\u00a0 The Levant is not Glasgow.<\/p>\n Fortunately, Klezmer is every bit as appealing as bagpipes.\u00c2\u00a0 My grandfather did marry a Glaswegian and so my love of the pipes must come from her.<\/p>\n While on the subject, yes David’s girl friend’s father’s DNA test must have checked out because David and Angella will marry July 27th on the shore where the Atlantic Ocean meets Canada in Newfoundland.<\/p>\n Just kidding about David checking Angella’s father’s DNA test.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been asked how we got started on this quest. As all such stories should go, it starts with, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Two people walk into a bar\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In the spring of 2010 my son, David, was in a Toronto bar with his girlfriend Angella. They were discussing finding an appropriate birthday present for her father. While surfing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,26,12,13],"tags":[48,47,46,49],"class_list":["post-90","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-photos","category-incidental","category-research","category-us-folk-post-frank","tag-23andme","tag-dna-test","tag-genesis","tag-search"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sintheta.org\/mcgene\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sintheta.org\/mcgene\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sintheta.org\/mcgene\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sintheta.org\/mcgene\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sintheta.org\/mcgene\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sintheta.org\/mcgene\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sintheta.org\/mcgene\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sintheta.org\/mcgene\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sintheta.org\/mcgene\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}