Anyone gotten their DNA tested? My wife really got into our geneology and we got tested. It was really an eye opener! All my life I was told I was mostly Dutch, German and Scottish. Turns out, genetically speaking, I'm more English than the typical Englishman. lol. I'm 90% English. The rest is 7% Scottish/Irish, 2% Western European, and 1% Middle Eastern (probably Jewish). Very surprised given what I grew up hearing. It's been very enlightening. Anyone else?
I had mine done a while back, with a scandinavian big, which probably relates to pre-conquest England. And a piece of Iberia that I do not as yet understand. It is very interesting. In terms of the middle eastern origins, don't forget that simple line in the Anglo Saxons Chronicles 'The Picts came from Sythia'
My wife and I did those for Christmas two years ago. We tried to test our oldest daughter too, but we couldn't get a good sample from her (she was 1 at the time). I tested 100% white with a majority of Western European, a stronger than expected dose of Irish, a fair amount of Scandinavian, and a strong Finn/Rus marker (which was a surprise that my mother still refuses to accept is accurate based on the oral history of her family). Recently, they emailed me an update and it indicated that I had a fairly unique marker which traces to a particular region of Eastern Norway on the border with Sweden. My wife is Puerto Rican and tested 41% European, 41% West African, and 18% Amer-indian. That is close to the average for mestizo Puerto Ricans.
Both my parents have done so separately. My father had no surprises. Predominately Iberian-indigenous with a significant British Isles minority (Our last name comes from an Anglo-Texan settler family who moved south) and small Sephardic Jewish and Sub-saharan African traces. My mom is pretty much primarily Celtic (Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish) and German with significant English traces.
Though I am always curious how they trace something like "Irish" or "Welsh" given the significant non-native settlement in the area.
I got tested. It came up with a large portion English, quite a bit of Swedish (southern) and a small amount of Western European with a trace of Irish and Scottish.
What do people get out of these DNA tracings? I guess it's kind of cool to see where your people came from...
It's mostly curiosity and you can find out your family tree then get ahold of people you didn't know from your family. Besides I had mine given to me as a gift so it didn't cost me any.
I haven't gotten mine tested yet, but I know I have irish from my mom's side since she had her test done. She browses Ancestry all the time and found out we had an Anglican priest in our family line.
I was into the Ancestry thing for a little while. My dad's family can be traced back to early colonial times (even further with a good researcher). My mother's family can hardly be traced prior to the 20th century. One strand changed their familial name to an Anglicized form upon emigration. My maternal grandfather was the first of his family born in the US, in the 1920s. His father had come from Rumania at the age of 13, as a Rumanian German - we have an old cassette tape of him praying "Vater Unser" at a family holiday meal. The Rumanian records are not so good. I did find an old US census which listed a farm hand as a member of the household. We asked Grandpa about this (he would have been about 4 or 5 at the time of that Census) and he said he did recall they had a long-term live-in farm hand from time to time when he was a younger boy. When he got old enough to work the fields they dispensed with hired hands.