![\"https:\/\/pixabay.com\/en\/dna-string-biology-3d-1811955\/\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2018\/01\/dna-1811955_960_720.jpg\")
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and, if so, what did you learn?<\/p>\n
I got the results back from my own DNA test, through Ancestry.com, yesterday, and I was, well, underwhelmed.<\/p>\n
![\"DNA\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2018\/01\/DNA.png\")
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The German part is fine \u2014 multiple ancestors on both Mom & Dad\u2019s sides.\u00a0 Scandinavia, too, is right \u2013 my paternal grandfather\u2019s parents both immigrated from Denmark.<\/p>\n
But Great Britain?\u00a0 I have one great-great-grandmother whose ancestry is unaccounted for and who possibly could be of British ancestry (from a poor white family in the south in 1870, about whom we only know that her first name is Elmina and her last name may or may not have been Ussery, depending on how many Richard Stapletons\u00a0there were in Tennessee at the time).\u00a0 Maybe the Irish ancestors (a great-great-grandfather) really had some English ancestry in him?\u00a0 (\u201cStapleton\u201d seems to be an English name which was brought over to Ireland.)\u00a0 In any case, there\u2019s no Irish ancestry here at all.\u00a0 (This is a distinct category, separate from Great Britain.)<\/p>\n
And my Greek grandfather?\u00a0 Perhaps he\u2019s represented by the Caucasus and Middle East as well as the Europe South bits, but that would suggest that the Greeks intermarried much more with their Turkish conquerors than I would have expected would be the case.<\/p>\n
So while I intellectually expected that it was iffy as to whether this test would reveal anything in particular, and I had figured that those commercials in which people make wonderful new discoveries are to be taken with a grain of salt, it\u2019s still a bit disappointing.<\/p>\n
Now, that isn\u2019t the end of the story, because there\u2019s still more that can be done \u2014 there are \u201ccousin matches,\u201d of which the two \u201csecond or third\u201d cousins are people I was able to identify on my family tree (one, I think, a child of one of my cousins that I\u2019m not in touch with, and the other, via google, a cousin of my father\u2019s \u2014 both of whom are on the best-known part of the family tree).\u00a0 There are more distant cousins, and it\u2019s possible to upload a family tree onto the site even without paying (I think), and I can download the DNA code and upload it onto MyHeritage.com, where we do have a family tree, and that site will also search for \u201ccousin matches\u201d even though it won\u2019t, I believe, provide it\u2019s own assessment of ancestry.<\/p>\n
So this means that this is the point in the blog post where I ask readers for their own experiences.\u00a0 Please share away!<\/p>\n
UPDATES:<\/p>\n
After an e-mail exchange with an uncle, the Caucasus\/Middle East matches up more than I thought it did:\u00a0 the family name has Turkish origins, and my great-grandfather, who immigrated to the U.S. to seek his fortune in the early 1900s, had travelled through both Greece and Asia Minor.\u00a0 I was also reminded of the population exchanges that occurred in 1923 in which Christian Turks were deemed Greek and Muslim Greeks were deemed Turks; while my family immigrated earlier than this, and were landowners, not landless refugees in Greece, it does suggest that there was no firm line beween \u201cTurk\u201d and \u201cGreek.\u201d<\/p>\n
I am also wondering if the lack of Irish ancestry is explained by a birth and marriage date that didn\u2019t line up in what I had seen previously:\u00a0 that is, if my Irish great-great-grandfather was really my great-grandfather\u2019s stepfather<\/em>, it would explain some conflicting marriage dates and identify my great-great-grandmother more definitively.<\/p>\n Which might be answered if any of the \u201ccousin matches\u201d are Usserys or Stapletons.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Image:\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/pixabay.com\/en\/dna-string-biology-3d-1811955\/<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" and, if so, what did you learn? I got the results back from my own DNA test, through Ancestry.com, yesterday, and I was, well, underwhelmed. The German part is fine \u2014 multiple ancestors on both Mom & Dad\u2019s sides.\u00a0 Scandinavia, too, is right \u2013 my paternal grandfather\u2019s parents both immigrated from Denmark. But Great Britain?\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":8019,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[576,563],"class_list":["post-8018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-family-history","tag-genealogy"],"yoast_head":"\n