I know what I would have thought! Well, genealogy and DNA testing can pro- vide some interesting and often unexpected results. For example, one man was surprised to find out that his ancestry showed that he was 70 per cent British and 30 per cent Irish and his sister was almost the complete opposite. How could this be? The first human genome


Myrna Driedger Broadway Journal


project started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. It cost $3 billion to complete the DNA study on one person and involved 20


different universities around the world. It was the larg- est international biological research project ever done. Since that time, DNA testing has become much more common.


There are several types of DNA testing, and they all have different uses. For example, if you are interested in DNA testing for medical purposes – to discover if you have a breast cancer gene, for example – that is a different type of DNA test than one testing for an- cestry. Scientists are even able to do testing in order to create tailor-made cancer treatments. The down side of the results of this type of testing is that some insur- ance companies are refusing life insurance coverage for people with certain genes. If you are interested in finding out about your ances- try, you are generally seeking to determine your ethnic- ity as well as find other relatives. This is a different type of DNA testing, one that does not reveal any medical information. So there is no danger of being refused life insurance. Three basic tests are used for this purpose:


Gone but not forgotten


Memories of a father who wouldn’t let polio bring him down


Helen Harper I


was a small child when Polio felled my father, like a giant oak tree crashing down from the


deep cuts of the lumberjack. I only remember the men strapping his life- less legs on the board and carrying him out of our house.


Time for a four-year-old is impos- sible to measure, but it felt like a very long time before I was allowed to visit him in the Princess Elizabeth Hospital.


Being introduced to the iron lungs swishing and puffing, breathing for people whose diseased muscles bod- ies are lining the halls in long silver tubes with only their heads sticking out, is, I am sure, the reason I don’t like sci-fi to this day. On the sunny side, my brother and I got to play with dad’s new wheelchair, the one he would be tied to for life. People either succumbed to the disease and what it did to the muscles of their bodies or like my father they fought like hell.


Once home, this tough Irishman began his own physical therapy by dragging his body and tools up the stairs, building the upper level of our house from a sit-down position. Our house was starting to feel like a home


April 2017


again. Over the next couple of years he finished the built-in cupboards and drawers, all sitting on a chair. In the end he did walk again although always with leg braces and crutches. I never heard the word disabled or “can’t do it” in our home. It was al- ways, “Let’s just figure this out.” And figuring it out was what we all did. Dad went back to work with Win- nipeg Transit, in the barns where they gave him all the jobs that he could manage sitting down. When he was approached to be a foreman he gently declined saying, “Give it to someone who can’t do the work.” At 65 dad retired and started to travel with mother. They were the family e-mail and texting before com- puters. Traveling every May and Sep- tember from one cousin to another, taking pictures and stories along with them.


Even at 80, when post-polio syn- drome forced him back into a wheel chair, there was never a grumble or negative word.


This gentle giant was an inspira- tion to all who knew him. The ability to find the silver lining, however small, is a true gift. I would lie if I said it’s always easy, but when I need help I feel his smile, square my shoulders and “just figure it out.” Helen Harper is a staff writer with CJNU.


www.lifestyles55.net 5


DNA & genealogy – discovering your background W


hat would you think if you discovered that your ethnicity was vastly different from your sibling’s though you have the same parents?


• Y-chromosome (Y-DNA) tests for the direct pa- ternal line, • mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) tests for the direct maternal line, • and autosomal DNA (atDNA) tests for finding matches on all your ancestral lines. Males inherit a y-chromosome from their father, through his father, his father, his father, etc., on the di- rect paternal line. This chromosomal DNA testing can give you information going back 5,000 years. Every- one inherits mitochondrial DNA from their mother, through her mother, her mother, her mother, etc. on the direct maternal line. Autosomal DNA is inherited from all ancestral lines, so anyone can be tested and your matches may descend from anyone on your pedi- gree chart, up to about six generations back. So how is it possible that a sibling can have com-


pletely different ancestry results even though you have the same parents? We get 50 per cent of our DNA from each parent. So that means we only inherit up to 25 per cent of our DNA from each grandparent and 12.5 per cent from each great grandparent. But what we inherit from our grandparents and great grandpar- ents is totally random. So, if we have one grandparent who was 100 per cent British, we could inherit as little as one per cent of the British ancestry while our sibling could inherit 25 per cent. The same would be true of all four of our grandparents. As we go through each generation we lose a lot of our “background”, which explains why one sibling could be 70 per cent British / 30 per cent Irish while the other sibling could be 10 per cent British / 90 per cent Irish.


Several companies do this type of DNA testing and, if you are interested, one way of deciding which com- pany to go with is to find out the size of their database. Because your DNA results are added to the database to find your ancestors and current relatives, it only makes sense that a company with the largest database would be able to give you the most complete results. One of the most common ones that we see advertised is an- cestry.ca and it currently has the largest database. But


DNA testing can tell you many things about yourself.


the cost of DNA testing has come down considerably since the original one at $3 billion!


Once you have received all your results you can up-


load them to a database called GEDMatch at www. gedmatch.com. GEDMatch is a free service that helps you find even more relatives who have also completed DNA testing and chosen to upload their results. So not only will you find more matches, the matches you find will be more likely to have an interest in geneal- ogy. It will help you to interpret your genome. In addition to pursuing DNA testing, you can also contact the Manitoba Genealogical Society, which can be found online at http://mbgenealogy.com/ or by phone at 204-783-9139. The Manitoba Genealogical Society has many resources to help you trace your fam- ily background, such as a large collection of books on genealogical research, local and family histories, Myrna Driedger, MLA for Charleswood with an emphasis on Manitoba, maps and periodicals from other societies in Canada and other countries. An individual member- ship currently costs $50 and entitles you to use all their resources in your search. If you decide to embark on this journey, I wish you luck and good “sleuthing”!


Myrna Driedger is MLA for Charleswood and Speaker of Manitoba’s legislative assembly.


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