52 Ancestors 2023 Week 17: DNA
Yes, I've been neglecting this blog lately. But DNA fascinates me and I have some things to say about it.
First: No incredible relevations of extramarital relationships or unknown children out of wedlock (at least, not recently) have been revealed by the several DNA tests I have taken: Ancestry, 23andMe, and Family Tree mtDNA. However, those tests have pointed out directions where I should have been looking for wayward ancestors.
Second: Ethnicity estimates are interesting but are not yet precise enough to really pinpoint your ancestral homeland (with a few exceptions). I haven't really learned anything more about those ethnicities than you could readily tell just by looking at me: northern European, British, Gaelic. I'm a pretty pale, blue-eyed individual.
Third: It's good to know that your relatives really are your relatives. But again, I look a lot like my mother's side of the family so no surprises there. DNA has confirmed numerous connections to my father's side, and some of those are interesting. Unfortunately, that side also had a number of slave-owners with all that implies.
On the first point, DNA finally pushed me to look more closely at my paternal grandmother's family. Olive died about 12 years before I was born so I never knew her of course, and my father never talked much about her family. For years, I had the wrong person in my tree as her mother (I think I had used someone else's tree early in my Ancestry experience, without checking: I know better now) but DNA kept bringing up individuals with a different surname that I had nowhere in my tree. Finally, I looked at that a lot more closely and realized that this name belonged to my grandmother's grandmother which in turn led to my third great-grandmother whose surname was Shuck. Elizabeth Shuck was Dutch Reform which suddenly explained why some of my DNA matches also shared both maternal (that side had been clinging to that faith for a century or two at that point after being expelled from both Holland and Brazil) and paternal DNA matches with me--up to this point, I thought these lines had always been pretty widely separated by geography. But no! They had, at one point in the late 18th, early 19th centuries, both lived in Henry County, Kentucky, and presumably intermarried (or whatever). Who knew?
Finally, I will say that I have never worried about my DNA information going public, so to speak. My son was in the Army from 2002 to 2004 when he was KIA in Iraq, and I know that the military had his DNA. I've happily provided my saliva to several companies and at least one academic study since then. This genie left the bottle some time ago, and will not be going back.
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