Invisible Histories

Recent news items of potential interest to Finland DNA Project members.

FamilyTreeDNA sale

• FTDNA is offering an upgrade sale for those who have ordered tests from them in the past. The deadline for ordering your DNA upgrade testing is midnight, the 22nd of June.
• On ordering the Family Finder upgrade, Suomi DNA-projekti admin Lauri Koskinen sent out the following email to project members yesterday:  Avaa Order tests & upgrades DNA-testitulossivullasi: esimerkiksi Family Finder 199$ (normaalihinta 289). Family Finder vertaa  kaikilta esivanhemmilta tulevaa kokonaisperimää. Se löytää yllättävän paljon DNA-serkkuja muiden Family Finder -testattujen joukosta. DNA-serkut luokitellaan vertailussa läheisiin ja kaukaisiin. Kun Family Finder -testattuja tulee jatkossa lisää, uusia DNA-serkkuja ilmestyy testitulossivuillesi. Jos menet sukuseuran kesäkokoukseen, kysy sukuseuratarjousta administraattorilta koskinen.lauri@gmail.com

FinnFest

• This year’s FinnFest will be held in San Diego California and runs from Wednesday the 10th of August through Sunday the 14th. The genealogy program includes ten lectures of great potential interest to project members, including three that specifically discuss DNA:  FTDNA’s Jane Buck on using genetic genealogy as another tool for the genealogist to make both recent family and ancient historical connections; Finland DNA Project’s founder and admin Lauri Koskinen on his experience with the project; Auvo Kostiainen and his work on tracing the roots of Delaware’s New Sweden colonist John Morton. Following the above lectures, on Friday, August 12th at 3:30, project member and geneablogger CeCe Moore will moderate a panel discussion on DNA. It will cover questions both specific to Finnish DNA, as well as on DNA in general. Panelists will include Jane Buck, Auvo Kostiainen, Lauri Koskinen and Paula Erkkila.
• FinnFest 2012 is slated to be held somewhere in the New York/New Jersey area.
• FinnFest 2013 will be held in the Michigan Upper Peninsula’s Copper Country June 19th-23rd, 2013 and the theme is “a Midsummer Eve’s Dream.”

As of today, the Finland DNA Project is the third largest hosted by FamilyTreeDNA, and includes 2365 project members from multiple countries around the world tracing their roots as well as seeking to connect with known and previously unknown DNA cousins. Online, many of us have been getting to know each other better through a Finland DNA Project group hosted by facebook. Please come join us! Whether you are already in the project or simply interested in what it’s about, all are welcome.

Posted in Finland DNA Project, FinnFest | | 8 Comments »

Finland DNA Project member CeCe Moore’s company StudioINTV has won a 2011 Telly award for their FamilyTreeDNA commercial.

The Tellies “honor the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the Web.”

Onnittelut!

Provided they become available, I will update this post later with any clips of the commercial.

Updated Friday, 6.3.2011, just in time for Friday Video: here’s an earlier and shorter version of the final commercial, for those of you who hadn’t seen it before (as it turns out, I’d posted this version last year).

Posted in Announcements, FamilyTreeDNA, Finland DNA Project, Friday Video, TV, Video and Film | | No Comments »

“Greener Grass” is an 18-minute video exploring immigration from Finland to America, as well as touching upon the larger issues and questions involved in immigration in general. Some of those addressed include:

And what can we learn?

Due to economic necessity, the majority of those immigrating from Finland to America did so roughly around the turn of the century; two sets of my great-grandparents did so in the late 1890s.

If nothing else, please see Finland DNA Project member Dan Karvonen’s comments starting at about 13:53 in the video. Echoing what another interviewee said earlier on, “all of us are immigrants.” This is a critical point that we here in America either too easily forget or ignore.

Posted in Finland, Finland DNA Project, Finns in America, Friday Video, Immigration History, Personal History | | No Comments »

A detailed post on where we are at the moment with Family Finder is now up on our project’s website.

Posted in Family Finder, Finland DNA Project | | No Comments »

The Finland DNA Project website maps have been updated — Y-DNA personal and haplogroup maps on 3/29 and the mtDNA maps yesterday.

If you are a member of the project, have Y-DNA and/or mtDNA results and ancestor information but don’t see your kit included on the maps please contact Mike (Y) and/or Laura (mt) so we can add you; admin email addresses are listed at our website on the left-hand side of the page.

As of yesterday we have 1191 returned Y-DNA results, with haplogroup percentages listed in descending order as follows:  N 62%, I1 27.9%, R1a 4.1%, R1b 4.1%, I2 .5%, J .5%, E .4%, Q .3%; additionally, one member is in haplogroup G and another in T.

We have 970 mtDNA results returned and 333 have ordered the mtDNA full sequence testing. Haplogroup percentages in descending order are:  H 42.6%, U 26.1%, V 6.4%, T 5.8%, J 5.7%, W 4%, K 3.7%, X 2.1%, HV 1.1%, I 1.1%, Z .9%, D .2%, N .2% and R .1%. We also have a handful of mtDNA haplotype clusters in a few different haplogroups who so far — even at the HVR level — have maternal origins only in Finland; remarkable in a database that currently numbers well over 100,000 mt results.

47 members are participating in the beta launch of FTDNA’s new Family Finder test, a test which has great potential for connecting the descendants of Finnish immigrants around the world back to previously unknown relatives in Finland, as well as confirming known paper trails and suspected connections which for one reason or another have yet to be proven.

Some background on the Finland DNA Project:  administrator Lauri Koskinen began it in December of 2006; Mike Swanson and I volunteered as co-admins shortly afterwards and Mary Lukkarila in December 2007. Our project seeks to help Finns and others who have Finnish ancestors (a) find DNA matches that may lead to confirmations and discoveries of shared ancestors and (b) learn more about their deep ancestral origins. Both men and women may submit test data. The Finland DNA Project compiles both mtDNA and Y-DNA test results and those results are published, analyzed, and mapped on our website. How we will incorporate Family Finder results has yet to be determined; we are just now seeing the first few results trickle in, with most tentatively due within the next six weeks.

Currently at 1854 members, we are the third largest dual geographic project hosted by FamilyTreeDNA (considering that FTDNA is based in the US, it isn’t surprising that the British Isles Project is first with 4512 members and Scottish Clans second with 2110). Although the majority of our project members live in Finland and North America, we also have members living in Australia, France, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Please join us in discussing the project! We have a facebook group going here, a new forum here hosted by dna-forums and another forum in Finnish moderated by project member mikej2. Friend and project member Ilmari Kivinen is also very active at dna-forums as one of the main moderators.

Questions? Feedback? Please leave a comment or email me directly (contact information is at the top of the page).

Posted in Announcements, Finland DNA Project | | 1 Comment »