The "Accidental Admin" - A Green Star in the Lone Star State

THE RATINGS

At some time before the conference, Max sent us an e-mail asking us to rate ourselves based upon a list of criteria as to our knowledge level of genetic genealogy. One of the criterion asked if we had ever given a presentation on genetic genealogy. Well ya'll know that I just had, so I'll be darned if that didn't just go and jack up my rating to a level right below the top! This rating resulted in a green foil star being adhered to my name badge. The purpose of the rating system was so we could help others less knowledgable on the subject. (HA!)

THE CONFERENCE

October 30 - The FTDNA Conference - Doug Miller and I met the day before when we flew in. Going in, we knew that we would gain A LOT of knowledge from this conference, but I had no idea just how much it would be, nor the effect it would have on me.

For the first half of the conference, I grasped the majority of the material that was presented. But when Dr. Bruce Walsh and Matt Kaplan from the University of Arizona made their presentations...

...I just sat there thinking how much I didn't deserve that green star!

Doug leaned over and whispered, "Do you understand what they're talking about?"

I replied, "About 50%".

Well, I did the best I could to understand all these 'foreign' terms like SNP (pronounced "snip") test and phylo-tree. These were things that I had never had cause to know when dealing with the results in my project. In hindsight, I now know that it's ok that I didn't know these things because haplogroups don't have a genealogical application like haplotypes do, but I didn't realize that until later.

Besides the awe and general fascination of what DNA testing can do, there were also times that I was irritated and angered, and then just downright perplexed a good portion of the time.
The unpleasant emotions came from unfair situations we heard about, like people refusing to test because they thought they could be cloned.

The mere fact that I had just been bombarded with a ton of stuff on the subject that I knew nothing about, created in me an insatiable thirst for knowledge. To put it simply, I was hooked!

Family Tree DNA absolutely spoiled us with that conference! Besides including lunch in the package, we were also given nifty goodies, like t-shirts and a canvas briefcase bag, but the best item of all was a pre-release copy of "Trace Your Roots With DNA" By Megan Smolenyak2 & Ann Turner.

I arose early on Halloween morning to get to the airport for my grueling flight and plane change. I don't like to fly, so I always try to sleep on the flight. I should have brought sleeping pills or my buddy, Mr. Xanax, because I could not sleep on that flight no matter how much I wanted to. My brain was going a million miles an hour from all the knowledge I had gained from the previous day. I gave up trying to sleep and read 'Trace Your Roots".

The first chapter I read was on Mitochondrial DNA...the conference did not have a thing about it.(But this year's will...)