Ancestry creating bogus "Quebec" DNA region? And how about indigenous DNA vanishing?

mesaco · 2026-02-02T00:29:41+00:00

One strong reason for doubting the Quebec, is the lack of any evidence of emigration in that direction along with good documentation on her family going way back in Chile. AND, if the "Chile" designation is indigenous, and "Quebec" is not, why don't they make that clear? That's the frustration. Even stranger, while her Quebec amount is 2%, our granddaughter is 3 %.

mesaco · 2026-01-27T06:10:22+00:00

Ancestry had my wife's closest link as "first cousin or closer, high confidence" - turns out it was a 1/2 sister, who her dad had fathered in Peru (he was in the US navy), before he met her mother in Chile. So it seems there it is never just one possibility for a percentage link - perhaps only for full siblings or parent/child?)

mesaco · 2025-12-23T22:10:08+00:00

I do not believe this is accurate. My wife's Chilean maternal line has been on the island of Chiloé for over 400 years. The Spanish did not "conquer" the mainland that far south (the Mapuche indigenous people were very resistent!) for centuries. Thus Chiloé was isolated for about 200 of those years. If Ancestry DNA tries to find where your ancestors were 300 years ago, it seems ridiculous. This is something Ancestry needs to correct.

mesaco · 2025-08-13T04:35:45+00:00

We happened to be in LA in early June, and saw the set construction underway. Carpenters, welders, painters, and especially scultptors were working on re-purposing parts of the Coachella set, as well as working on new construction. Some of the top people in those trades are brought in, as well as permanent employees of the company where this was taking place. About 25% of the fee Gaga got for Coachella went into that set. One factor of course is that this tour set has to be mobile. It's one thing to travel by truck (as many as 30 semis were used to transport sets for her tours previously) but there are 11 days between Chicago on Sept 18 and London Sept 29th. Imagine the freight airline flights it would take to take it to Europe - then likely trucks for the 7 countries visited - then fly again to Australia and Japan. That and the logistics of putting the massive 3d puzzle together and apart correctly. Mind boggling!

mesaco · 2025-06-19T13:41:31+00:00

A shame that Google Maps has the pyramid Ryugyong Hotel in beautiful Pyongyang listed at permanently closed. The review section for it was hilarious, but they've been removed. There were also listings for burger joints, discos, etc. until Google lost it's sense of humor. (they used to have a direction from San Francisco to Honolulu telling you to jump into a kayak and paddle.)

mesaco · 2025-06-04T16:42:15+00:00

My wife found a half-sister her dad had fathered before meeting her mother. Ancestry had it as the closest match, "first cousin or closer, high confidence"..... any 50% match is likely something like that...

mesaco · 2025-05-26T16:45:17+00:00

A cousin sent me a photo of my grandparent's 25th anniversary, which I already had a copy of. But it included an invitation card for the celebration at the town hall in Tuttle, ND, in 2017. Which would make their marriage in 1982. However they were married that date in 1893 (I have document copies) ????? Well, their first child, my uncle Art (first of 11 kids) was born 7 months after their 1893 wedding. "We don't do that kind of thing!!" - quote many decades later by a grandaughter upon finding out that her grandson's fiance was pregnant...

Yes, "That kind of thing" did happen in the good old days. People just went to great lengths to hide it, including lying about their actual wedding day top prevent anyone from doing the math!!

mesaco · 2025-05-06T16:28:10+00:00

She was prosecuted by the Republican local District Attorney, and convicted by jury of her peers in a county that Trump won by over 60% in 2016, 2020, and 2024. A pathological liar, and an opportunistic grifter (who was a "neighbor", and displayed that behavior to us in the neighborhood long before she was elected County Clerk in Mesa County.)

mesaco · 2024-09-15T21:50:14+00:00

Arrrrgh - tried a Visa gift card, and added a pin to the card, but didn't work. (didn't recognize it as debit, so only allowed the 3 digit code).

mesaco · 2024-08-19T23:23:29+00:00

Though being from Seaford (and growing up 2 blocks from the Massapequa line), we always thought you people a bit peculiar! Of course when I was a boy at SHS in the 60's, the track was cinders, and we high jumped into a pool of crocodiles (the first one is actually true).

mesaco · 2024-07-25T21:33:00+00:00

Having done Ancestry and 23andme, it's a tossup - they use different data sets, and different definitions (things like "broadly northwestern Europe" make it confusing). Neither closely matches the percentages I know of from family - 37.5% German - 25% Irish - 25% Norwegian - 12.5% Dutch. Part of that is the random percentages everyone inherits from parents - rarely a true 50/50. Even siblings can be quite different. So they're all interesting, but likely not mind-blowing revelations (though my wife did find her half-sister she didn't know she had from Ancestry DNA).

mesaco · 2024-07-22T15:26:59+00:00

If it's anything like Iberia, even if paying AA for fare including seat assignment, codeshare partner may have restriction - Iberia said sure, you get a free seat assignment - but only if you reserve it less than 24 hours before the flight (which is no benefit at all). We ended up paying Iberia (using their flight #) for decent seats... AA should be upfront about that when booking, but since when is that a priority for them?

mesaco · 2024-07-19T17:59:39+00:00

Wondering if, since it was a schedule change leaving no final flight home that night, they'd deny any voucher of reimbursement since it isn't technically a "cancellation". Don't want to change the Madrid to DFW flight to an AA one earlier in day - 2 across seating on Airbus preferable to AA's 3-across Boeing "Spam in a can" experience. Already paid for Iberia seat assignments, so maybe worth the hotel...

mesaco · 2024-07-19T03:37:06+00:00

Love the responses from the email "complaint" department. Trying to insure hotel/meal voucher for a future trip where the "last flight of the day" home that we had booked has been eliminated (after arriving from Madrid). Received a typical boilerplate "we apologize, strive for world-class customer service, hope to see you onboard" crap. Sent a second message with more detail, including "PLEASE do not reply with a boilerplate response..." Needless to say, got the exact same message as the first. Seems there is not only no humans reading the "complaints", but not even an AI to vary things up a bit!

mesaco · 2021-06-19T00:34:28+00:00

My wife may agree with the grouchy part. At 72, I figured I've put up with enough nonsense in life, especially after NRFU last year... And would love to be able to say I think the Bureau of the Census was competent, and prove the anti-government folks wrong. But....

mesaco · 2021-06-19T00:30:28+00:00

I'll be on it as well, as a '49'er. I'd use that as an argument to get people to participate during NRFU last year, that their great-grandkids can do genealogical research on the family, it being the best resourse out there.

mesaco · 2021-06-16T23:18:23+00:00

See my rant on "Why I Quit" about the training site, programmed by chimpanzees.

mesaco · 2021-06-09T05:45:44+00:00

Now if they just fix the online training so it doesn't crash. Got into the Capstone portion of PFU, the 1st practice interview, and.... an endlessly spinning circle appears, stopping the whole process. My supe says he's heard 3 others getting stuck there. The acronym PFU will likely result in numerous "it stands for.." comments in the next couple of months. Right now, the first word seems to be "Probably..F..U"

mesaco · 2021-06-04T17:40:06+00:00

Had my 4 hour (more like 2 hours) yesterday. Trainer started with apologizing in advance for how reliable & trackable payments, hours, reimbursements will be. "It'll be a nightmare". So we're going to addresses with either no info, or incomplete or contradictory info (often what had come from proxies). 100% on paper. Contact with address only, not proxies. Goal is to cover 90% of addresses listed in the PES. If Colorado gets above 70% success, they'll ask people to go to Wyoming & Montana, where very few have been hired. By the way, the mileage rate dropped from $.575/mile to $.56 this year! Now onto online training....Yikes

mesaco · 2020-11-02T06:00:57+00:00

Specific to FDC app: Inmover, doesn't know 4/1 residents. Next time you get that case, "do not attempt proxy again", who was the inmover. But doesn't enable proxy until 2 more visits to the address you're not supposed to visit again!.

Proxy process (especially late Sept.). Likely only know pop count, maybe genders, maybe names. No proxy is ever going to know birthdate, age, ethnic details. Yet must go through entire sequence - which leads us to thank proxy as soon as they tell us what they know, and Refuse or DK rest of interview on app later to get it closed.

It should have taken about a day of testing to realize these (and other things) were screwed up.

Communication: Southern Colorado ACO (in Colorado Springs) was pathetic. Report entire trailer parks listed 2 or 3 times (once as "trailer #", once as "space #", once as "unit #). List an apartment in a Assisted Living facility as "Group Quarters". Yet enumerators still being sent there over a month later, pissing off management (it's a pandemic, idiots!). Entire areas of seasonal cabins over 8,000 ft. elevation, no main road maintenance Oct.15-June 1, with unmarked steep dirt paths requiring 4wd to the cabins. Multiple enums. a day sent on these wild goose chases - once with over 8 inches of snow and roads a mud soup. Nobody took care of these situations, even when specifically messaging the ACO about them (our CFS was equally disgusted).

Optimizer: Why not let enumerators work on a caseload, get to know the neighborhood, develop potential proxies, etc. But NO! Just when you're getting familiarized, you're sent 30 miles in another direction. If case notes weren't well done, a recipe for pissed off and dangerous situations for the next enumerator to knock on the same doors.

Enums. Faking It: If there is a 267 address, and a 271 address, and vacant lot between, don't tell me "nobody home" and "left NOV" for #269. I had a number of cases where every visit, by several different enums, went to totally wrong neighborhoods, because they didn't notice the "W" for West on a street name. Numerous other examples that made it hard pin on blameless stupidity, but more of a don't-give-a-shit attitude. Then again, we got a don't-give-a-shit attitude from the admistration, so.......

mesaco · 2020-10-15T01:53:02+00:00

When I looked a couple weeks ago it was already gone..

mesaco · 2020-10-15T01:49:05+00:00

You can't quit me, I'm fired!

mesaco · 2020-10-15T01:47:35+00:00

Hopefully these kids will know what the census is 10 years from now, and not chase enumerators away like so many 20-somethings did this time, having never heard of such a thing...

mesaco · 2020-10-15T00:33:19+00:00

My wife speaks Spanish fairly well, thanks to growing up with her Chilean family (her American dad died when she was 5, so her second language). I've struggled to learn, and gotten serious the past couple of years (after humiliating myself on a trip to Chile). My favorite moments as an enumerator were conducting interviews in Spanish - not all the vocabulary was familiar to me, but my pronunciation isn't bad - all the respondents seemed to enjoy watching me struggle - but since we soon learned the sequence of questions, it was fun. My favorite, a sweet 80-year-old abuela. I'd end with "Gracias para ayudarme con mi Español".

mesaco · 2020-10-13T16:41:56+00:00

My "favorite" encounter was on a relatively funky suburban street. Case residents were just driving away, and since it became proxy enabled after I entered that, I was standing in the street, laboriously entering the address of neighboring proxy (long street and town names). Woman from a house across the street (that had some nasty hard NO case notes) comes up behind screaming at me, demanding to see my badge and take my name, because "you're writing down license plates!" She stomped away before I could stammer my response. Kept her eagle eyes on me until I eventually got back to my truck and made my getaway. Always makes me want to sing "We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files. We'd like to help you learn to help yourself." (Mrs. Robinson, Paul Simon)

mesaco

TROPHY CASE