LDS Ancestry and Your Roots

[moksha]

Say you send LDS Ancestry.com a DNA sample and they send back information telling you where your ancestors came from. Would you be disappointed if they failed to mention anything about the Lost 10 Tribes?

Is LDS Ancestry abdicating their responsibility to the Church by not providing a linkage to the tribe listed on your patriarchal blessing or any mention of an ultimate source of your genetic material coming from Elder Adam and Sister Eve?

Can this oversight be understood and forgiven in light of needing non-LDS customers for business profitability?

[crossmyheart]

I am doing DNA testing with my mom for Mother's Day. I am so excited. Only I am not using the Ancestry brand. I am so stealing your idea- I cant wait to bring this up with my mom and ask her about her tribal lineage.

I cant answer your question about their oversight with a straight face- it is too funny.

[Hagoth]

Hilarious question, Moksha. This is another one of those wall-Jello doctrines. I got in a kind of heated discussion with a patriarch about this. He insisted that the lineages he divines in his blessings are literal ancestry. My Chinese wife and I are both from Ephriam, according to our patriarchal blessings, while her sister has no tribe at all, but was revealed to be a direct descendent of Japeth. I should have asked him about that but he was very old and I didn't want to make smoke come out of his ears.

[Give It Time]

I do need to clarify a point. Ancestry is close friends with the church, but not church owned. They have coffee machines. They serve alcohol at their celebrations. They are the main supporters of SLC's gay pride parade.

Now, moving on to the DNA question. I do believe it opens thorny issues. For generation upon generation we've been using cencus and Christening records. Suppose the father of record isn't the biological father? Suppose, all this time you thought half your family tree was British, but it's actually Russian?

These things will be sorted out in the millennium.

[Random]

I do need to clarify a point. Ancestry is close friends with the church, but not church owned. They have coffee machines. They serve alcohol at their celebrations.

Good to know this. Thanks.

Say you send LDS Ancestry.com a DNA sample and they send back information telling you where your ancestors came from. Would you be disappointed if they failed to mention anything about the Lost 10 Tribes?

Is LDS Ancestry abdicating their responsibility to the Church by not providing a linkage to the tribe listed on your patriarchal blessing or any mention of an ultimate source of your genetic material coming from Elder Adam and Sister Eve?

Can this oversight be understood and forgiven in light of needing non-LDS customers for business profitability?

I had DNA testing done. For the most part, it matched my genealogy, but I found I was from 0 to 3% "European Jew." The disparity of the numbers comes because they run the DNA 40 times for each area they test for (via computer, I expect). They give you a percentage which is an average. Some of my 0-3% places were averaged to be 1% and some were averaged to be 2%. (However, my pb does not say I'm from the tribe of Judah.)

I think if one comes from lines that vanish into Europe or Siberia or one of the Scandinavian countries (Vikings), one could believe that one is descended from the lost tribes anyway.

Also, iirc, they only go back so many generations. Nowhere near far enough to find Abraham, let alone Adam and Eve.

[2bizE]

I have often wondered if Ancestry DNA would end up proving much of the church doctrine false...