Archive by Author | Kitty

Results for a second cousin on the Skjold line

Oct5

The results for our second cousin John who shares Skjold and Wold ancestry are just in today at 23andme so of course the first thing I did was compare him to me, my brother, my dad, and a few other cousins. Interestingly John has inherited far more DNA in common with us than our Munson side 2nd cousin has.

Dad shares 608 cM over 25 segments with John and only 389 cM within 18 segments with Dick, our Munson 2nd cousin. My brother shares 281 cM over 13 segments with John as opposed to 155 cM over 7 segments with Dick while I share 282 cM in 15 segments with John as opposed to 175 cM within 10 segments with my Munson 2nd cousin Dick.

Here is a pretty picture I made with my chromosome segment mapper tool:

Our 2nd Cousin on the Skjold line from Segment Mapper

Overlapping DNA from our 2nd Cousin on the Skjold line compared to family with the Segment Mapper

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It’s Pomegranate Season!

Oct4

Having enjoyed eating pomegranate seeds in my salad at a friend’s birthday dinner, I thought I would try eating the ones growing in my backyard.

pomegraniteSmll My first try colored my cutting board red and much of the floor as well. So I got on my computer and googled “seed a pomegranate without mess” to learn a better approach. Click the read more to see the two techniques I found. I confess that I have converted to the water technique which is amazingly easy.

The seeds are a crunchy, sweet, filling, and very healthful snack. A good source of vitamins K and C as well as potassium and all sorts of anti-oxidants. See this section of the wikipedia article for more in all that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate#Nutrients_and_phytochemicals

 

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Lakeside Garden Club

Sep19

I recently volunteered to replace my garden club’s web site and asked members to send in photos.

Lakeside Garden Club

Slide Show page on the new Lakeside Garden Club site

 

Marilyn McFadden of McFadden Ranch sent in lots of wonderful professional shots with expert commentary specific to our part of Southern California, so I made many slideshows and used her plumeria photo as the site header. I am learning alot from doing this!

My Double 3rd cousin versus my brother and my Aunts as shown with my segment mapper

Sep5

The results came in for my other maternal Aunt so now there are four of us to compare to my double third cousin and still no match on the X! In order to show the comparisons I used my new nifty chromosome segment mapping tool and also added in a bunch of known 5th and 7th cousins to the diagram.

Dbl3rdCOusin

Click on the diagram to go to the full size html page made from the segment mapper. Note that Shipley Munson is my brother.

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Areas of faster and slower mutations in our chromosomes

Aug30

A team of Penn State researchers has made a map of human chromosomes that shows the areas where mutations are more and less frequent; in their words “mutationally hot and cold regions.” However I found their diagram extremely difficult to understand. It took me quite a while to figure out the areas that are hot and cold for the SNPs that genetic genealogists are interested in. So I redid their image, removing the color for microsatellite repeat alterations, and changed the colors a little to be more in tune with hot and cold for me.

Here is my version:

HotColrAreas
Hottest
  Hot
  neutral
  Cold
  Coldest

 

Gray presumably are the areas not done and white outlined with black shows the centromeres. The one place with the least mutation is the X chromosome.

 

No guarantees that my reinterpretation of the graph by Kateryna Makova and Francesca Chiaromonte is correct!


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