Thursday, March 25, 2021

Animations by MyHeritage / I was named after my father's mother




My grandmother in the late 1900s.

Me in the 1980s.

Me in the past few years.

Hmmm ... This appears to me to be an extremely enhanced photo-shopped version of me but I can see for the first time a slight resemblance to my mostly Norwegian grandmother whose grandfather didn't marry her grandmother and remains a mystery except that he may have had a German father and an English mother.  The animated me from the 1980s does not appear to me to be the same person as the animated me in recent years.  

According to 23andMe, I am:

69.3% Scandinavian

15.9% British and Irish

6.7% French and German

0.4% Central Asian, North Indian and Pakistani

23andMe has determined that my only nephew is:

35.4% Scandinavian

15.2% French and German

7.5% British and Irish

30.8% East Asian and Native American 

0.2% Central Asian, Northern Indian, and Pakistani

Although I no longer subscribe to MyHeritage, I received an email from them recently giving me this brief opportunity to try out their animation function.  I was able to animate about 10 photos before the MyHeritage website no longer allowed me to continue animating photos and began asking me to subscribe.

Genealogy fascinates me.  I continue to search for clues about my great great grandfather on my father's side and my great grandfather on my mother's side, both of whom disappeared mysteriously, leaving two of my female ancestors to raise their children without fathers.

Here is one of the two times that my grandmother saw me in person.  My grandfather had died during the previous winter.  She saw me again when I was 3 years old.  She died when I was 7 years old.  Both of my mother's parents died before I was born.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is so interesting to see those animated photos. My paternal grandmother died before I was before, and I am named for her as well. Her name was Rose. I did 23 and me a few years ago. An interesting look at our genetic heritage.

Karen said...

I put my late husbands photo through that animation trial. Seeing his smile again was just so sweet.
My ethnicity is widely different among the three companies I've tested with. Our native n.american has shown up again on my brothers. Funny how it comes and goes.

Carruthers said...

That was really interesting. When you look at the animation of your latest mugshot, do you feel it really looks like you? If it does, it means that these old photo animations are probably pretty accurate. I keep meaning to try it myself.

It's 5.30am here. I woke up too early - a good time to catch up on blog-reading!

Sabine said...

That is a beautiful picture of you and your grandmother.

At times, I am tempted to do the DNA testing. I wonder whether it would make me feel in a specific way about myself or my family, whether I would find a hidden secret. But I usually forget about it. I know so much of my family on both sides dating back to the 15th century, so what. I realise that this may be so much more important to people born to immigrants to the US, especially when the immigrants arrived a long time ago.

There is also a lot of reluctance here due to data protection and what US firms (the are all in the US) do with personal DNA data. Some of it would be actually illegal here.

As far as I understand it, the commercial providers only examine regions of the genome in which individual people differ (SNIPS, i.e. single-nucleotide polymorphisms).
As R explains it to me: When we talk about genetic differences between populations, we are only talking about 0.1 percent of DNA. 99.9 percent are identical.
We have so much more in common than what separates us.

am said...

Carruthers -- I don't think that the animation of the recent photo looks like me. It is flattering, yes, but not how I see myself (-:

Carruthers said...

Hmm. It occurs to me now that I might have asked a daft question there. I don't suppose any of us see ourselves in our mind's eye the way others see us. I guess if we want to test the voracity of these animations we need third opinions of the animations of living people.

A friend said he thought Heritage animations blinked too much. I guess eyes are the easiest bit to animate. Either that or people used to blink more in the olden days! :)

I do like them, though. Saw some good ones of Edgar Alan Poe, Karl Marx and other 19th century figures.