Thoughts on genetic genealogy and health history

For the past couple months, I've had an increased interest in my family's health history.

I ordered a few death certificates to verify causes of death for grandparents or great grandparents. I've got one more to order before I'll have them for all my great grandparents. I've known their close genealogy for awhile, so wasn't motivated to order theses more recent certificates as genealogical sources. I finally paid out the $24 fees for a few certificates from Maryland (they're too recent to get from the state archives).

I even started to think about the potential benefits of testing with 23andMe for a report on my health history. Unfortunately, that was just about the time that the FDA ordered them to stop offering tests that were marketed as medical information. To comply with the order, their DNA tests no longer report on medical matters. See an 23andMe announcement about the change (click).

That is why I was interested when I read Roberta Estes' post about Promethease. (click)

Turns out there is a free version (available here).

I ran my file. I'm running a few of my immediate relatives raw autosomal data through it too. Many of the so called "good" or "bad" just balance each other out, but it is interesting. It met my needs and satisfied my curiosity without costing me any cash.