ROOTS & BRANCHES

Whether it’s animating photos or adding search capabilities to some of its databases, worldwide genealogy subscription service MyHeritage adds a lot of sizzle to the family history world with its innovations.
One they announced a month ago called Ancient Origins has caught my fancy. Well, almost.
Ancient Origins is a genetic genealogy product that complements MyHeritage’s DNA ethnicity reports and traces those origins up to 10,000 years into the past.
The company’s original release on the features says, “Ancient Origins allows MyHeritage DNA customers to discover the ancient populations they descend from, such as Imperial Romans, Norse Vikings, Phoenicians, and Ancient Egyptians. MyHeritage is currently the only major genealogy service to offer such high-resolution ancient DNA ethnicity analysis.”
The feature is the result of a new partnership between MyHeritage and Illustrative DNA, a startup company that is at the forefront of ancient ethnicity analysis. “Ancient Origins compares an individual’s DNA to ancient DNA samples and populations from the Neolithic Period through the late Middle Ages, providing greater depth to the understanding of one’s ethnic makeup,” according to MyHeritage.
Now I’m still working on getting my results and will provide the “Roots & Bramches” readership with an update, but here’s my brief: I don’t really care about Imperial Romans, Phoenicians (everybody ought to have one of those markers, as prolific as these maritime city-states were!), or Ancient Egyptians.
What I’m really waiting for is to be able to drill down into the Germanic tribes of the so-called Migration Period at the end of the Roman Empire.
A quick tangent: I’m also a little bemused that the name “Ancient Origins” is including populations up to and including the “late Middle Ages,” which are not “ancient” in the historical sense (Yes, I’m old school on this: Ancient times, historically, ended in A.D. 476 with the finale of the Western Roman Empire; the Middle Ages lasted from then until A.D. 1453, when Constantinople, capital of the remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire, fell to the Ottoman Turks, ushering in the Modern Age).
But let me return from that digression! As someone whose paper trail proclaims him to be about 98.5 percent German (the various DNA companies’ results are lower but have been coming around with every update!), I want to know whether I’m descended from the Franks (was Charlemagne a cousin? Probably … I think he’s a cousin to everyone)?
And while Ancient Origins includes major Germanic tribes such as Visigoths and Saxons, what about the Cherusci, the tribe to which early German hero Arminius / Hermann belonged? (Ask the Romans about the Battle of Teutoburg Forest and how that changed the course of the empire’s history)
Or the Quadi, which I’ve always thought was a cool name for a tribe?
Or what about the Thuringii, the ancestors of what became Thuringia in central Germany? But then again, maybe I might want to leave well enough alone.