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.

@fluoxe 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!

So did mine (he also had form for cheating on my mum) so I had the same fears and genuinely expected it. Well I needn't have, none have popped up. I realise that doesn't mean there isn't any, but no matches besides cousins

There's a new celebrity DNA thing forthcoming. John Simm (who apparently only went on to support Philip Glenister) discovered that his father was not his birth father (I get the feeling there may have been a conversation with his mother at the point he did the test) He decided not to pull out of the show but used it to trace his biological father, now dead, but he discovered a half sister.

Powerful stuff when the unexpected is so close to home and I feel for him.

She forced your mum to give her DNA sample?

I don't know about cool but if you go back 3 generations on my maternal side and 2 generations on his maternal side me and my exH share a grandfather 😳

A similar thing happened with a friend of mine.

His mother gave birth at 17 back in the early 1960s in the USA and the child was given up for adoption. He was then born four years later.

Fast forward to 2015, he and his mum both did DNA tests and then in 2018 so did the adopted child. He said it was such a shock finding out in his 50s that he wasn't an only child (his mum had never mentioned the adoption).

My dad was adopted and we always knew who his birth mum was but not his father. She had told his adoptive parents it was an American GI. DNA matches show loads of American relatives and even a tiny bit of Native American DNA. So that seems true. I’ve tried messaging all the closest matches to see if we can identify his dad but no one has got back to me. I think one might be a half aunt or cousin or something. Also found his British half brother and through him his half sister and many half cousins. They all look like my dad and sister (I take after the other side of the family) and it’s really weird to see other people who look like him. Haven’t been in touch as I don’t know if they know about him. Though his half brother matched with me so must be wondering what that is all about.

Also I have always felt very boringly English and while my dna from my mum is 99% English my dads is all over the place, a lot of Eastern European which is quite exciting.

I did a similar DNA test thingy, but haven't paid the extra to get all the info so haven't found out that much, however I am confused about my ethnic heritage. We have always been told that my father's grandmother was Indian, as from India. My father and his brother certainly look as though they have Indian heritage. My DNA shows that my genetic heritage shows only 0.8% South Asian genes, and nothing else that isn't European/Caucasian. I have 2 sisters, I am the eldest. My middle sister looks very like me, and our mother. My youngest sister looks more like my father and her daughter also looks a little like him. She was also born with a Mongolian blue spot birthmark, which is usually only found in people of Asian heritage.
My father was the love of my mother's life and I don't think she would ever have been unfaithful to him. Also they were married in 1960 and things were different then. However I cannot understand why I only have 0.8% South Asian heritage!

Missing great aunt that nobody ever mentioned - my mum didn’t know about and her dad didn’t count amongst his 7 siblings. She died on her own in a different town in her fifties. I am thinking maybe severely disabled or black sheep of family in some way, but even if she went off with the wrong man/was a lesbian and shunned/ was Downs I’m surprised she wasn’t known about as she was the youngest sibling

My twins both had them all over - I’d never heard of them and we were all shocked at them! They are part of why we did Ancestry for me and DH- but no- both firmly UK with a bit of northern Europe and maybe 1% North African. When I researched the spots it said around 1% white Europeans have them too.

i actually printed out the Wikipedia page so people knew what they were as they were so distinct and bruise-like

I am White British but have distant Afro American cousins in the USA . I can't work out how we are connected.

Does that mean that your parents arent your parents?!?!

@girlwhowearsglasses the hospital was about to call social services, thinking it was a severe bruise, until one of the nurses was on the ball enough to ask my sister about her ethnic background! It was in Bristol as well, which I think had a big enough ethnic mix then for it not to be unheard of. Just shows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, or ethnic background by what somebody looks like.

I'm just the same. I've managed to trace the connections for my ancestors.

My experience may be totally different to yours, but maybe not.

Basically, most of my family have spent the last 400 years living within about a 20 mile radius of one city in the west of England. The men have mostly been farm labourers (although there was the occasional butcher, baker and stocking maker [also, an actual candlestick maker] - and even a rabbit catcher) and those women who were recorded as having jobs were generally laundresses or worked in domestic service.

So it's interesting finding out about the ones who left.

One example is two cousins who went over to America in the 1650s. They both ended up growing tobacco in Maryland.

Then, tracing their descendants, you are suddenly hit with the reality of slavery.

The first US Census was in 1790 and, at that time, as an example, one of my relatives in Maryland was recorded as including the following in the home:

Free White Persons - Males - Over 16 - 2
Free White Persons - Males - Under 16 - 2
Free White Persons - Females - 4
Number of Slaves - 7

So, that is two white men over 16, two white boys under 16, four white women and seven slaves.

It's interesting to note that "white males" are split between adults and children but women aren't. Neither are slaves.

It was not unknown for female slaves to get pregnant to their white masters.

This may well be where the distant relations come from.
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But it could equally come from much later emigrations. For example, I also have relatives who emigrated to the US in the 1850s. Some of them then moved to Utah and became Mormons (or already were). Others moved to, as it was then, the Dakota Territory. Any of these could also be a source of the connection.
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If you're wondering why links going back so far might show up in your DNA Matches, this is due to something called "endogamy".

In genetics there is something called "endogamy" which is where the same extended families tended to intermarry over several generations. You can then still see the results of this in the DNA hundreds of years later.

The intermarrying means that more of the dna is retained within the family for much longer and it makes it appear as though you are more closely related to somebody else than you actually are.

I do have connections with early US colonial families. When talking to distant relations, who are descendants of these families and are also studying their family tree and DNA, they have told me that they have found literally dozens of examples of finding ancestors on eg their father's tree who has a DNA link to their mother or that both their mother and their father have a DNA link to the same person.

Another thing with endogamy is that you end up with many more matches and also a lot of shared matches, precisely because families intermarried so much.

It is not uncommon for colonial Americans, Ashkenazi Jews, French Canadians and US Cajuns to have large numbers of DNA matches due to endogamy many decades or centuries previously. The same thing applies to certain communities from South Asia as well.

I've also had some of my extended family here in the UK marry each other over several generations in the 1700s and 1800s which also adds to this.
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So TL;DR it's likely that you have some distant relations that went over to America and they may, or may not, have been slave owners.

Yes, but there's also another site called FreeBMD Index where you can search for births, deaths & marriages. You could put in John Arkwright and his approx date of birth and find all the John Arkwrights born that year with their mothers' maiden names and the areas. This can help you narrow down your search on Ancestry. You can also then order birth certificates or marriage certs if you like ( if they're not already on Ancestry). Marriage certs will give you their addresses, fathers' names and occupations. All interesting stuff! I cried when I received my much-loved Gran's marriage certificate!

what information do you have? Is it decades back or a couple of hundred years?

Then, tracing their descendants, you are suddenly hit with the reality of slavery

I was thinking about this with regards to MellowMallow.

Reticent means not wanting to speak.
Reluctant means not wanting to.

Me too.

Thank you for this,that's absolutely fascinating!
My great grandad and two of his siblings all married siblings from the same family, so I'll bear this in mind if I ever get around to doing DNA testing.

If that was aimed at me, reticent can also mean reserved, hesitant or reluctant to perform a specific action.

The amount of people that signed up to this without knowing about the privacy of their data is shocking.

@Another2Cats

Thank you for your help . Looking at the matches I have on ancestry the Afro Americans are 4th cousins or half 3rd cousins once removed. We have 1% shared DNA . 31 cM across 2 segments.

Looking at some DNA matches on the site we have in common and looking at Ancestral regions we share I know they are from my maternal line .

None of the names in my tree match with theirs .

I discovered a load of really poor people and then a murderer.
I did not renew my subscription.
I prefer the family folklore that we are descended from east coast fishermen who in turn are descended from Vikings. The fact that everyone else in the family is blond/blue eyed and I am brunette is a little worrying though.
I have decided to live in the here and now.

I have the same. I don’t think you’re going to like the probable answer.

eta, I didn’t see the very detailed post just after yours before I posted, ignore me!

With something like 31cM then you're probably not looking at the sort of distant ancestors that went over to America in the very early years.

You may not be looking at slavery, as that ended in the USA in 1865.

Also, although the connection may be as 4th cousins etc, it may not have been the direct ancestor that went over to the USA, but it may have been a later descendant.

For example, my dad has a 5th cousin once removed who lives in the USA and they share 34cM of DNA. The common ancestors are a couple who were born in Gloucestershire in the 1740s.

Most of their descendants stayed in the area and worked as farm labourers etc. I am descended from one of their grandsons who stayed put. But several of the other grandsons emigrated in the 1850s, two to Canada and one to the USA.

The 5th cousin is a descendant of the guy who emigrated to the USA in the 1850s. So, it is very unlikely indeed that they were ever involved in slavery.

I've found quite a lot of DNA matches have ancestors who emigrated to the USA back in the 1850s-1890s.

"Looking at some DNA matches on the site we have in common and looking at Ancestral regions we share I know they are from my maternal line."

This is a great start. You can go one step further and narrow it down even more.

You know the link is from your maternal line. The next step is to see if the link is through your maternal grandfather or your maternal grandmother. This will narrow things down.

Depending on how distant the links are, you may be able to go even further. For example, if you find that the link is through your maternal grandfather, then is the link through his mother or his father?

"None of the names in my tree match with theirs."

This often happens. The only way to get round this is to do another tree which is basically their tree.

If you get all the shared matches who are in the USA then they will have a common ancestor somewhere along the line who went over to the USA. Effectively you need to build their tree and find out how they are related to each other.

From there you can start looking to see how that common ancestor of theirs fits into your tree.

Although, a little warning, if there are any cases of an unknown or wrongly recorded father (eg the mother was unmarried or had a child by a man other than her husband) then it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to trace things.