While putting together a photo-book of our girls growing up – something for their families for Christmas this year – I want to include something of a family tree, at least a pedigree. I wound up getting on Ancestry.com and doing some research. The results were interesting, on both sides. But the real surprise was my wife's DNA test.
Her whole family has always taken great pride in claiming almost pure Irish descent, with a strongly rumored dollop of Cherokee Indian. Oops.
While her relations, on all four sides, are pretty traceable to the British Isles, it seems she has to reassess her life-held view of self, and I have to put a little more effort into figuring out just how her ancestors got to where they seem to have come from. She came up 54% Scandinavian, 24% Southern European (Italy, Spain, Portugal) and another 20% from a swatch of land reaching from Poland through Greece.
I'll admit a great deal of disappointment in the lack of specifics for this. Some of these areas are pretty diverse. But the meat is in what is not there. NO native Irish, or any Celtic genes whatsoever. A family that sees itself as Irish might might well be descended from a bunch of Viking and Roman invaders who managed to avoid local contamination completely. How does this happen?
Needless to say, my very short, petite, brown eyed, brown haired wife has mixed feelings about this – and is very strongly inclined to NOT communicate this information to the rest of her very extended family – outside of our own girls that is. And as far as the Cherokee – which many members of her large family do resemble, well that could possibly be in the remaining 2%. But hey, if they were that wrong about the Irish, well…………
I've found that many, many of her ancestors arrived here from England in the 1600s, gradually heading for the hills of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky – heavy on the Andersons and Watsons. Who knows, they might be families that spent time in Ireland and later migrated back out. Whatever the explanation – she certainly ain't what she thought she was.
So now I've decided to bite the bullet and send off for my own test. Hey, my family just "knows" that we're almost pure German. I've already dented that and traced one branch back to Scotland – I'll probably find out that, genetically, my Western European heritage is completely lacking too, who knows.
I wonder how many people experience a similar shock from these tests.
