BLACKSTONE BOUGHT ANCESTRY FOR NEAR FIVE BILLION DOLLARS : HOW PRIVATE IS YOUR DNA ?

LATIMES WHAT MIGHT Blackstone DO WITH ANCESTY'S DNA DATA 

The PAPER version of this article which appeared in the LA Times on April 13, 20121 by David Lazarus was called  "What Might Blackstone Do With Ancestry's DNA Data?"  On line, where it is showing up in Spanish, it is called  "Why Would A Company Invest Millions To Buy Ancestry, If It Is Not Interested In The DNA Data Of Its Users?"

Excerpt: He and other bioethicists were quick to note that existing federal medical privacu laws do not apply to genealogy sites.  These companies are basically free to do whatever they want with people's genetic data.

"A lot of these sites are bait and hoax," Caplan said.  "They offer interesting content, but what they're really looking for is your DNA."

So take the industry's genetic privacy guarantees with a grain of salt.  These companies operate largely in the shadows and their activities are limited almost exclusively by an honor system."

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But nearly every expert spoke with cited  the partnership  announced in 2018 between Ancestry rival 23andme and pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline.

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This is a very important article and if you have allowed your DNA to be submitted to ANY genealogy site, I agree with the journalist who wrote the article.  You have no protection and no company spends billions for data they are not going to use.

REMEMBER THAT GENEALOGY DOES NOT DEPEND ON YOUR DNA. Genealogy depends on DOCUMENTS.

ETHICAL USE OF DNA DATABASES BEHIND CAPTURE OF GOLDEN STATE KILLER - EXCELLENT ARTICLE FROM LA TIMES (UPDATED APRIL 2021)

The article by Paige St John which begins on the front page of the Los Angeles Times,  paper edition, dated December 10th, is detailed and excellent but at this moment I haven't found a link for it.  In my labels below I've listed the companies that figure in the process in which the killer's DNA matched others.  The Golden State Killer mystery was one that many a professional and citizen sleuth tried to solve. No doubt he needed to be caught.  But we all wonder if our DNA that we so willfully submit for the purposes of meeting long lost relatives and solving genealogy research problems, is really as private and secure as we desire.

I may have mentioned that I've never taken a DNA test myself.  My own research is off and on.  There are things that took many years for me to find, again not looking every day for twenty years but still.  

I remember the day I sat next to a new researcher at a Family History Center who got one spool of film and went back six generations in her German heritage family in that afternoon.  Because I was working on ancestors in a Central - Eastern European country and the records were sloppy and didn't have details of the German records it has taken me many years to get back close to 1800. I'm forever interested but not obsessed.

And so you must ask yourself what you are giving up about yourself in hopes of gaining in research.

I will search for this article again in the near future, hoping it's considered important enough to have a link.  If not, search out the paper edition.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE.

Here is the link LA TIMES UNTOLD STORY OF HOW THE GOLDEN STATE KILLER WAS FOUND

MICHAEL BRUNNER - CHARLES MANSON's SON INTERVIEW

Raised by his mother's parents, Micheal Brunner's birth father was the infamous criminal CHARLIE MANSON, of MANSON FAMILY FAME.

1639 BODIES BURRIED IN LOS ANGELES; THE UNCLAIMED, THE UNIDENTIFIED, THE ESTRANGED, THE POOR

Imagine if you outlived all your friends and no one was there to bury you, or you become homeless and die on the street without identification. Would anyone attend your funeral? The answe in Los Angeles is yes. Yesterday several hundred bodied which had been creamated first were buried and these are people who were kept at the cornoners for 2-3 years before put into the common grave.

"It's hard, especially when you have to cremate babies," he said. "Off the top of
my head, there are about 300 babies this year from hospitals around the county,
with families who can't afford to bury them."

Linking to the article...

"Interfaith burial rites and prayers were included, with readings from the
Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish and Christian traditions. The ceremony concluded with
the Serenity Prayer, Psalm 23 and a blessing of hands over the burial site."

YOUR EUROPEAN ANCESTORS WERE PROBABLY SURVIVORS OF THE BLACK DEATH

CHANCES ARE VERY GOOD, if you are from European ancestry, that your genes are survivors of the BLACK DEATH - The Plague. I just read a fascinating article in the travel section of the LOS ANGELES TIMES, a paper copy, about tourism to the OBERAMMERGAU area, for the purposes of the yearly passion play, which has been put on every 10 years since the town promised God it would do so, if it were spared the Black Death.


According to SUSAN SPANO, the journalist who wrote the article called IN THE ALPS, A SAVING GRACE, which appeared in the Sunday June 7th edition, "Before the first Passion was staged and the plague abated, almost 100 villagers -died, relatively few compared with southern Germany as a whole, where the BLACK DEATH killed more than a million people.

JOE MOZINGO makes the FRONT PAGE OF THE LA TIMES for his three part article on TRACING HIS FAMILY HISTORY

"One came from an acquaintance who said he found a bunch of Mozingos in a phone book in the Imperial Valley and was told they all were Basque shepherds. On this authority, we became French Basque.

Next we heard that "Mozingo" was an Americanized version of "Mont Zingeau," a mountain in France or maybe Switzerland I could never find on a map.

All of this was beginning to feel a bit dubious when I met Sherrie Mazingo, whose name is a variation of ours. Sherrie was a broadcast journalism professor at USC when I was a grad student there in 1996.

She was black — and she had news." Joe Mozingo

I READ THE STORY ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE MAY 16, 2010 LOS ANGELES TIMES in paper... Link now to the internet version.

WHAT DOCUMENT IS THE MOST WANTED from THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES?

Answer: Copies of the picture of Elvis Presley posed with President Richard Nixon, Elvis' letter to Nixon! Link to the Los Angeles Times article out today, about that day...

HIS BIOLOGICAL FATHER IS CHARLIE MANSON

There were a lot of news articles on line to pick from but this one from THE SUN, has great photos showing the likeness that confirms that Charlie Manson, the infamous head of the Manson Family and Los Angeles DJ Matthew Roberts are father and son.

I'm posting this, not for the lurid aspect of this breaking news, but because adopted as children, many people feel it is important to find their real parents. It varies from state to state and the laws and contracts at the time of adoption, but through adoption registry sites, at the age of 18 a child can post seeking a parent.

This has to be one of the more rewarding areas of genealogical research for me, but at this point this is my advice to Matthew Roberts. Even when all paperwork and looks are persuasive, get a DNA test that confirms the match!

HELPING AFRICA IN THEIR DNA - LOS ANGELES TIMES article by TERESA WATNABE

Click on the title above to get to the article, which was the front page article today. Journalist TERESA WATNABE tells us that wealthy African-Americans are using DNA tests to determine what tribe(s) their slave ancestors were from, and then applying for dual citizenship, while also creating social programs for those people. Focusing on African-American actor, Isaiah Washington, who says that he dreampt African landscapes and find the faces of his ancestors in the Sierra Leone people he is genetically related to.