Friday, September 30, 2016

The Stranger in My Genes (book review)

Griffeth, Bill (September 6, 2016). The Stranger in My Genes. Published by New England Historic Genealogical Society. ISBN 9780880823449.
From the publisher's book description: "Bill Griffeth, longtime genealogy buff, takes a DNA test that has an unexpected outcome: 'If the results were correct, it meant that the family tree I had spent years documenting was not my own.'"

This personal memoir by CNBC anchor Bill Griffeth was a short easy read on a topic that interests me in general as a genealogy and DNA researcher with my own (now solved) family mystery and because I share DNA with the author's Griffeth cousin. One small quibble is that the book confuses mtDNA with X-chromosomes (brothers with the same mother are expected to share identical mtDNA, not necessarily X-chromosomes, and mtDNA results for the author and his brother were almost certainly what he was comparing not X-chromosome data as stated). I therefore don't recommend it for the science aspect, but that represents a very small part of the memoir.