Don't have a drop of Welsh in me!

[cantoncween]

I'm Cardiff born and bred. Always seen myself as Welsh. Maybe not as Welsh as people from up North and that, but still Welsh. Used to go down the museum close by and see the old houses, imagine they was my family and that who lived in them.

Have done my family tree. All my family down to 1870 were born in Cardiff. So all of my great great grandparents are Cardiff people. But before that, they all moved in from England. Places like Herefordshire, Devon and Somerset. I'm gutted, not a single drop of 'Welsh' in me. Just English people who moved to Wales. I been reading up, and apparently this is common for Cardiff people.

Cheer up, OP. Maybe one of your great grandmothers had a thing with the ‘Welsh’ milkman.

So your family have lived in Wales for 153 years, but the stain of hailing from Englabd in the preceding generations to the 1.5 centuries you've got is too much for you to swallow!

You do realise that borders are arbitrary, have moved lots all through history, communities have moved and mingled since forever based on war, work, food, love and many other reasons.

I think your ancestors would be pretty disgusted with your attitude to be honest. I imagine they've all worked hard and arrived for their children and those after them to have as good a life as they could possibly achieve (in our social security days don't forget) as most parents do and if that meant great great great grandad or whoever ended up in Wales who are you to judge!

Why don’t you do a dna test? You might find you are even a bit Welsh?

Strived for their children that should say

I am a Cardiff person and I have Irish and English heritage but a family member did a DNA test and came out about 50% Welsh so I am sure I have some Welsh in me too. The Irish and English came to the South Wales valleys to work in the coal industry in the 1800s.

All my ancestors on my grandfather's side and my grandfather were Welsh. I did an ancestry DNA and it said 8% Welsh. Why? And there was me thinking Wales was my spiritual home.

Anyone can be Welsh, wherever they're born. I am one of those north Walian very very Welsh people, but my family tree is all over the place. I think that relating someone's nationality to their ethnicity is dodgy ground tbh.

I did an Ancestry DNA test and got most of what I was expecting, Irish (Donegal and Wicklow), Welsh (Anglesey), English (Liverpool and Shropshire) and... Scottish. Now, I don't have a single Scottish ancestor and I can trace most branches of my family back to the 1500s so God only knows how 50% of my DNA is apparently Scottish 😂

My point is, do a DNA test and you might find that you are part Welsh after all 😁

That's ok, we still love you. However, you will have to downgrade your username to DevonDuchess.

Doesn’t surprise me to be honest. My family tree goes back hundreds of years all from the east coast and north east of England and my dna came back with 0% UK dna
im actually over half Scandinavian and the rest is Balkan, Greek and Italian and further back in my dna there’s Asian too.

One of my grandfathers was Welsh, the other Irish. I still consider myself to be English though, why wouldn't I? It's where I was born and where my parents were born. I would feel daft referring to myself as Irish or Welsh, especially as I haven't even been to Ireland.

Of course you're Welsh! Would you say people whose ancestors moved from Ethiopia, or Japan or Brazil 130 years ago, but were born in the UK, (and who parents and grandparents were born in the UK,) are not British?!

Actually, strictly speaking you are actually British, not Welsh. But that's a whole other argument.

My dna test was mostly Irish and balkan with a little bit of English. Not going to start doubting if I’m English and referring to myself as Irish. Would be bonkers. Ethno-narcissism has a way of biting you in the bum.

There is no ‘Welsh’ DNA or ‘English’ DNA though is there? That % they give you of Welsh, Scandinavian, Irish are based on areas of the country or world where there are concentrations of people with similar DNA to yours. And your nationality is just where you live or were born now - that’s a political, geo-political reality not something that’s physically mapped on to your DNA.

It’s very odd that you feel unable to call yourself Welsh just because you found out some of your ancestors were ‘from’ England. Who’s to know that they didn’t at some stage move from Wales to England and then back again?? And why does it matter?

I’ve had my DNA done on Ancestry but don’t pay much heed to the % pie. And to be honest I don’t completely understand genetic genealogy. I hope someone who does can come on this thread and enlighten us all 🙂

Of course you're Welsh. I'm Irish born, Welsh brought up, and consider myself very welsh indeed (Welsh mother). Feel it very strongly indeed. My welsh family emigrated from England and Ireland (way back) - doesn't make me any less Welsh and I am technically half-Irish! It's what you feel.

@DoIWantToGetIntoThisHere It's just a bit of fun really I think 😅 It did help me confirm some of my family tree questions though! I solved the long standing family mystery of whether my Nanna's dad was actually her dad. Turns out he was as I have a shared DNA 4th cousin from my great granddad's family.

You were born in Wales, as were your parents, grandparents and great grandparents. You are Welsh. If Ancestry was the important factor, we’d all be all sorts of things.

Definitely do a dna test.

But you ARE Welsh. If that's where you grew up, where your parents and grandparents are from - you ARE WELSH.

You wouldn't dream of telling someone whose granny had emigrated to the UK that they weren't British, or descendants of refugees who arrived in Britain in 1914 that they weren't British. So why do you think that you aren't Welsh? It's a really weird way of looking at things.

My own ancestry is a real mix of Scottish, English and Irish. My paternal line is from communities right on the Scottish border with Northumbria which as others have said is an arbitrary line on a map. I'm Scottish and British, with heritage in Ireland.

The % of ethnic/country DNA that gets chucked out is based on very limited/unreliable data so you can take it with a pinch of salt. The ethics of these tests really do worry me, there’s no counselling or support for people finding out family secrets and similar, albeit I think there’s some proportionality involved here as you are talking about being from Wales several generations back, which is a bit different to when you discover that “Dad” isn’t your father.

Totally agree, @Rainbowshine. The "ethnicity estimates" are very unscientific and vary massively between sites. My ethnicity estimate on MyHeritage is:

87% Scottish/Irish/Welsh
6% English
4.6% Scandinavian
2.3% West Asian (Turkey, Iran Iraq)

My ethnicity estimate on Ancestry is:

76% Scotland
12% Ireland
9% England and NW Europe
3% Wales.

Obvious differences between the two! According to My Heritage I am 5% Scandinavian and 2% Turkish or Iraqi. I do know quite a bit about genetic genealogy and cousin matching, and also know that if those estimates were in any way accurate I would be expecting to see matches in my list from people with Swedish or Turkish family history. And I am not seeing those matches. Most likely explanation is that I am matching with test-takers from the US or Canada and I am being incorrectly matched to the Asian part of their family tree rather than the British/Irish part. But I have done lots of family tree research, and a Y-DNA test on my dad, and understand about centimorgans. Easy to see how someone logs into the site, sees that they are a certain percentage West Asian (or any other unexpected heritage) and starts leaping to all sorts of conclusions.

I do think that the tests should come with some sort of health warning. It's perhaps unlikely that you test and match with another test taker in a range which would suggest that it's your Dad. More likely that you uncover other relatives at a more distant match and can't fit them into your tree. This happened to DH when he did his test. The matches he is getting strongly suggest a "not the parent expected" event a few generations back, the most likely scenario is that his grandfather's father was someone entirely different from the man listed on the birth certificate.

You need to know what you are getting yourself into, and if you don't understand Centimorgans, have access to someone who does. I have seen so many people taking an Ancestry test and leaping to conclusions - even confusing "parental" and "paternal". I have paternal match - OMG MY DAD IS NOT MY DAD!! No, it just means you have a match on your dad's side...

Just sounds like op has a pretty strong anti-English agenda to me. The op and all these comments humouring it are in pretty bad taste.
Probably why people like my friends DD get such hostile reactions when they have the temerity to go to school in Wales when the kids think they're English (even though their gran is from Wales).
It's just xenophobia plain and simple and op is turning that on herself.

I'm Nigerian-British and was born and raised in England yet would never consider myself English. I can empathise. You're an a English-Welsh woman and that's a wonderful thing to be :)

My grandmother was from South Wales. We found out through ancestry that the family actually moved from Cornwall to south wales 150 years or so before she was born. Presumably they were tin miners who went into the coal mines. It was very common for people to move to where the work was. I am glad my nana never found out. She was so proud of her welsh ancestry!