I agree Aliph. I'd only do it for the ancestry. My mom did it for both the ancestry and the health stuff, because she was more concerned about the health things, although she came out low for all health risks anyway. She's 90 and doing fine.
You raised a good question about Obama. He's half White and half Black. I could never understand why everyone just considered him Black. That never made any sense to me either. He's as much White as he is Black.
NealC: Did you do this yourself or was it your parents? It is a lot of fun, and your story is hilarious.
Im going to do it myself (I think the kit cost $100) and then you send in a saliva sample and they give you the online results in a few weeks. I was into the genealogy hobby 20 years ago, before the DNA stuff was available and I got a lot of good information going back to about to1800. But, it’s not like the DNA tests. Americans are into the DNA tests (especially 23ndme) but Europeans are doing a lot of this too (I saw it on a recent Good Morning Britain TV show.) I don’t know how true it is, but I read something once that said if you had White ancestors who lived in the US South, like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, before the Civil War that there was a good chance these White folks of today from that area had some degree of African ancestry (like 5-10% or something ). That was of course due to the slave owners raping their Black female slaves. Some of those babies turned out not looking so Black and occasionally „passed“ as Whites and went on the marry Whites after the War ended. I don’t know how true it is, but it’s plausible. It’s laughably became it flies in the face of the old Jim Crow laws and segregation that created the „one drop rule“- one drop of Black blood made you Black. That was much worse than what the Nazis even decreed.
My sisters had their DNA test done by different labs. Theirs turned out like my mom’s but my oldest sisters' showed a much higher number for Norwegian DNA . It could be because my dad had all the Irish background and a friend of mine, whose mother was from Norway, said it was typical for the Vikings from Norway to be raiding the coasts of Ireland and Scotland, and of course leaving babies behind.. My mom came out zero on the Italian, Mediterranean and Eastern European lines. The only exception was Sardinia with a one 10th of one percent number. No idea how that got in there.
On my father's side we came out about 30% Italian, most of the rest a Mediterranean Mix (including some Greek, our last name probably had a Greek origin), but also 12% Arabian . 12% means a full blooded great grandparent. We traced it back, my father's grandmother was adopted, she also had a rather odd first name. With this dna it probably means she might have looked Italian but in reality was full blooded Arab. Of course that freaked my racist uncle out - no way he was anything less than 100% Italian, a descendant of the Emperors. How and why the emperors moved from Rome to Naples to give birth to him is unknown. Then we told him he was probably about 6% Jewish, so he hung up on us :-)
On my mothers side we got a lot of English and Scandanevian blood, which makes sense for her English background. The Vikings were all over England once upon a time. But her father always claimed he was from Lichtenstein, his name was Otto and during the world wars he made it clear there was no way he was German. But come to find out we have no Germanic blood at all -- Eastern European. He was probably from Romania, Austria, or Hungary, all German allies in the wars. But where he was really from is a lost mystery.
Anyway, lots of fun.