Has anyone discovered anything cool from doing Ancestry DNA?

[fluoxe]

Unexpected ethnic origins, for example? I’m a bit wary of doing it for the usual reasons but I do think it would be interesting to find out so I get why people do it.

My very patriotic mum's dna came back and she was a tiny percentage her native dna and mostly British dna... she was not impressed!!! She's always going on about how her home country is so much better but she turned out to be more British than my British dad!!!!

Me too - darker skin, dark hair and from Yorkshire. I thought I was likely pretty much 100% English but had people asking me where I'm really from (🤨) since I was a kid. Turns out the 5% of my dna that's not English is from Sweden & Denmark. That's from my mum's side - my dad's side is 100% English.

My DP has a wide mix of various heritages which surprised us. We also found out his ancestors on one side were carnival folk when we did his family tree.

Everyone always thinks my DH is Polish for some reason, as far as we know he’s English/Irish but it does make you curious. Judging from the responses here he’s probably English/Irish as expected!

I’m a bit worried about secret families popping up 😱 My Dad used to travel all over for weeks at a time so god knows!

My friend discovered that her "father" was not her father!

Thanks @TennisLady. I've not heard of that but will try it out.

I was the cousin found by someone on the other side of the world. It's a long story but she never knew her father (my uncle).
We're hoping to meet one day.
It's pretty cool.

Greek great grandmother- I was always told she was Egyptian!

Luckily (?) the half siblings had come out of the woodwork already so no surprises there. A school mum bought tests for her family at Christmas as a gift and it unearthed her Dad's affair and subsequent child with the affair partner.

A friend in her seventies re-united with the son she'd given up for adoption as a very young teenager.
I'm very distantly related to the actor Roy Dotrice 😁

Dgran always said that she knew that her FIL was not my granddad's dad (his birth was registered under his mum's maiden surname). Grandad was allegedly the result of a May bank holiday fling in margate 🤔

There was a whole shennanigans before my grandparents married where gran asked grandad to legally change his surname to his "dads" as well. Dgran didnt like her MIL at all and didn't want to have her maiden name as grans married name.

After doing DNA I found a match to someone as a possible 2nd-ish cousin but we have absolutely no names in common in our trees. I think it's possible her greatgrandad is my grandad's father. The families lived 5 miles apart in very busy parts of north London.
One of grandads brothers grandchildren is on Ancestry but they wont have 2nd cousin as a match if our grandfathers had different dads. Not sure where to go from here

DGrans MIL was meant to be jewish but not a smidge of that ethnicity in my dna!

By this, so you mean the sort of "ethnicity estimate" or "DNA Origin" that websites come up with?

All they do there is to compare your DNA with people who have a long history of living in a particular region. It can be misleading at times.

What regions (if you don't mind me asking) does it show instead of Germany?

Or, do you mean, that there are no DNA matches with people that should be there, such as first or second cousins etc on your mum's side?

My DNA and ancestry tree helped 2 women who were adopted separately but had the same mother to discover who their father was. He's deceased now but they really wanted to know their parentage. I'm not sure how recently those of you who were interested in ethnicity did your DNA. Every year the ethnicity is updated as more and more people test to give them a better database to base their results on. Mine has changed significantly over the last 10 years to a general British to defined parts of Ireland and Scotland, with outposts to settlers in specific parts of Canada and Australia. I have done enough on my genealogy to back these up.

"Not sure where to go from here"

Possibly have a look for any Shared Matches between them. If you click on the person you will then see three tabs that say "Trees" "Origins" "Shared Matches"

If you click on the Shared Matches tab this brings up everyone who shares DNA with both of those people.

So, you know that all of these people have the same joint ancestor somewhere if you go back far enough. See where they fit onto your tree and that should help pinpoint who the unknown father is.

Just a little warning though, if the link is a very long way back (eg 5th or 6th cousins etc) then there is a possibility that there may be more than one common ancestor if families intermarried over the generations.

My utter cunt of a cousin took it upon herself to go searching for my adopted Mum's birth Mother, even though my Mum has been explicit in her wishes to not know anything about them.

Now my Mum has to live with having her birth Mum's name, location (close by), that she has siblings etc all forced upon her because some people don't respect boundaries and are general nosey bastards.

I can't look at these sites the same after that.

My mum researched our family tree, but pre-Ancestry!

She found out my great Grandad on Dad's side was illegitimate. He was born during WW1 and his dad was fighting in France when GG would have been conceived.

My great gran on Mums side gave birth illegitimately to my gran. My mum never liked her Grandad, she calls him a to this day. My gran was named one thing at the register office but her dad, after marrying her mum, forced her to change Gran's name, but not legally. I don't know what skullduggery he committed doing this. My mum had no idea! My gran knew though, because she needed her birth certificate to get a passport and her mum wouldn't give it to her, saying she lost it. Family legend has it Great Grandad was a bully, an abuser, and a criminal.

That's terrible of your cousin

More Scottish than I expected and absolutely no English. Knew my heritage was mainly West/Central Irish with a quarter Lithuanian. Also a random 3% Roma

so does this mean you're adopted ?

That my grandad wasn't my grandad. Nobody knew, my mum had died so couldn't even tell her that the man who she thought was her dad wasn't.

Found some new half cousins by matching with them and subsequently worked out who my biological grandad was. I was in my 40s when this all happened so he had died. My cousins haven't been keen on contact, etc and gave me some brief details. I may have half aunts/uncles who are alive but have no idea. They have people on their family tree who it would suggest are half aunts/uncles but names are blanked out as still alive. Likewise census records and stuff are only for older records so not sure what to do.

And a friend of mine found a half sister she knew nothing about, they've met up now which is lovely.

Woah !

"They have people on their family tree who it would suggest are half aunts/uncles but names are blanked out as still alive. Likewise census records and stuff are only for older records so not sure what to do."

If you are on Ancestry then go back one generation (or more if necessary) to where there are names.

"...but names are blanked out as still alive"

Have a look at the parents of those people. Often, both (or sometimes just one) will have died and you can trace the names from there.

Here is an example:

So, let's say that the parents are called John Hardacre and Doris Arkwright (just made up names).

You find out that they married in, say, 1950. You then search the birth records. You leave the First Name box blank and put in Hardacre as the last name.

Put in a range covering ten years from the date of marriage. In this example, it's 1950 so that would be 1955 +/- 5 years.

For location, put in an area around where they were living.

Then, in the box for Mother's Last Name put in Arkwright. You can also use a wildcard here, eg Ark*, this will bring back all names that start "Ark... " if you are unsure of the spelling.

You then hit search and that will give you everybody with the surname Hardacre where the mother's maiden name was also Arkwright and they were born in that area in the timescale you are looking at.

This will likely get most of the relevant birth certificates (these would be the blanked out aunts/uncles).
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If only one of the grandparents has died (so the other one is still blanked out) then you would need to find out who the other person married before you did this.

Going back to the earlier example, if you knew that John Hardacre was the grandfather but the grandmother was blank you would need to find out who that John Hardacre married. You would find the marriage for him and Doris and then you could start the process above.

A couple of things to point out. If the family moved about quite a lot then you may not pick up all the children. Also, if they are common surnames then you may find another couple with the same combination of surnames (eg Hardacre and Arkwright) who were having children in the same area at the same time.

Finally, if the parents were unmarried then the birth certificate only gives the name of the mother and the child may be given either the mother's surname or the (alleged) father's surname. This can make it tricky tracing births as well.

Thank you @Another2Cats . I’ll try this. I don’t currently pay for access to any paid for records, have just looked at free stuff. Is paying through ancestry the best website to use for more recent birth records, etc?

You can do this same sort of process for free on freeBMD:

https://www.freebmd.org.uk/

The fields have got slightly different names, but it works the same way.

Sorry, forgot to add, freeBMD generally goes up to about 1992 but there are some later birth records. This should cover the dates for the blanked out aunts/uncles.

If you want more modern records then you have to use the General Register Office website (also free)

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/login.asp

You need to register with them but it is free.

From there you go to search the GRO Online Indexes

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/indexessearch.asp

It's a similar method there as well but you have to search for boys and girls separately and you can also only do a date +/- 2 years.

Amazing, thank you…..will get cracking.