Hi, decided to do a log where I can chart my progress through figuring out my family tree. The plan is to do a blog post a week, at least, a blog post a week for this particular topic. This week we start with my DNA test results, learning some very new to me things, and me getting back to trying to rebuild my father’s work on our family tree [my computer corrupted my copy [and I think the only copy] of all my father’s work].
So, a few weeks ago, I got back my results from 23&Me, and got a few shocks. Before anyone says anything about different interpretations from different sources, I -know- this, but the shocks at least on one side, were confirmed by my mom. My dad dies in 2000, so all I have are his notes [more on this later].
So, before this test, I’d always thought my dad was mostly German/French [but German, again, explain later], with maybe some traces of Irish. My mom thought he might have been half Eastern European because she was convinced my grandmother’s maiden name was her married name [again, explain later], but nah, she was good old-fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch, like most of my dad’s side of the family.
And I always knew my mom was half German and a quarter Czechoslovakian and a quarter Yugoslavian Rom [What? I’m old.] So, imagine my initial shock of learning that I wasn’t mostly German with a chunk of Slovak, but… well, look at this image.
So, its not in here, but apparently I’m more Polish than anything. No French, but vaguely German [as I saw in my family tree, my German ancestors came from pretty much every part of Germany except the part I expected, which is well, currently in France], but then there is the British & Irish. I’m like, yay I’, part Ir…. nope, all English and Scottish, and it can pinpoint the areas my small amount of DNA has come from.
Then well, the strangeness of the Spanish & Portuguese, the Greek & Balkan, the Scandinavian and the Italian… And who knows where the last 24.5% is from. I mean, it could be from my Great Grandfather, the one who was a bit swarthy, and who told my moms stories of sleeping under wagons, and cooking chicken on the run [First, you steal the chicken….]. Unfortunately, he died when I was five, and we’d already gone back to W Germany the year before, so I very vaguely remember him, but its very dim.
So, I called my mom that evening and find out that ‘Oh, my dad’s parents were from Prussia, and my grandmother spoke Polish.’ Like, gee thanks, mom, I could have known that -years- ago. But to be fair, my mom didn’t know those grandparents well; her mother hated her in-laws, and her father died when my mom was 18, so…
So, part of what I’m getting at is, I really only knew my immediate family and my mom’s mom and mom’s mom’s mom. I met some of my dad’s aunts and such, but that’s a story for a different post.
This is the first post in a series of blog posts where I spend time talking about the ‘fun’ of trying to piece together my family history, and figure out who I really am. I think in a few posts, you’ll understand the ‘fun’ being in quotes. My mom’s family is going to be tricky to track down because all of her grandparents came over from non-English speaking countries, but at least its tidy. My dad’s tree is a tangled, complicated, headache of a tree, that seems to ALL go back to the 1600s, in the US.