How to 'get over' finding out your ancestry is not what you were told?

[erwoo]

I was brought up being told that my great grandfather was Jewish. I recently took an ancestry DNA test, and I now know that this was not true. He had lied about his origins after 'running away' as a young man. He was actually from Newcastle. Growing up, this was a big part of my identity, as my grandmother was raised with stories about grandparents escaping from Russia et cetera. Now we know it is all a crock of

220 years!!!!

Lol

My great grandfather (just one of them) was born in 1880. Only a period of 150years or 100 years until I was born.

I think you need a new calculator.

medianewbie
The way I read your question is this. Your dad is dead, and you are not in touch with his side of the family. His sister and the person you thought was his brother (B) have also taken a test with My Heritage. You matched with them both, but you were surprised to see the match with B suggests he may be your half sibling. If correct, this suggests your dad had a son when he was young, and the son was brought up by his parents as your uncle.

Is that your question? If so, have they both died since taking the DNA test? Or could you ask them? The fact that they have both taken these tests (when not many people do) suggests that perhaps B had wondered about his heritage, and asked A to take the test.

Are you thinking of taking the Ancestry test because you know that your aunt and B have both taken that test as well, so you can compare results? The results will obviously differ, as the companies use different algorithms. But if B isn't on Ancestry, what will it achieve?

How long ago was this? You could order B's birth certificate and see who is on it. I'd start your own thread here, so your question doesn't get mixed up with the OP.

You're right, because too many people just accept every hint on Ancestry without doing their own research. And DNA testing needs to be used alongside old fashioned genealogy I.e searching the records.

Just because it doesn’t show up on the test doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. I’m Dutch (grew up in the Netherlands and moved over for uni) and have confirmed Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. When I did a DNA test it didn’t pick up my Jewish ancestry (I have synagogue records etc) and put me at less than half Dutch. I had a lot of Middle Eastern DNA yet none of my family can be traced back there. Honestly these tests are a load of bollocks.

I thought DNA doesn't lie ? People are being convicted because of DNA .

DNA doesn’t lie but the way that these tests work is by attributing certain genes to certain ethnic groups based on probability. Often if your ethnic group shares origins with another ethnic group or your DNA mix mirrors that of another ethnic group the test gets confused. I’m not middle eastern but as a Jew I share lots of DNA similarities with the Lebanese for example.

This is mostly a pile of bollocks. Genes getting separated and stretched at conception?

As a PP said, Ancestry, 23andMe et al are very accurate in terms of showing who you share DNA with and being able to work out family relationships. Being able to triangulate who shares what DNA with who along with people’s trees and public records make it quite straightforward.

The “entertainment” parts of Ancestry testing are the matching of your DNA to reference populations to say you’re 50% British 50% Ecuadorian or whatever. They are dependent on whatever reference population the company is using, and these change. Mine has shifted over time to currently show I’m 50% Scottish according to Ancestry, which is nonsense by the paper trail, which is also confirmed by my shared matches. i haven’t found a single one of my ancestors who were born, lived or died in Scotland. However I do have a fair amount of ancestors on both my mum and dads side that come from Ireland, including Northern Ireland and apparently the reference population for “Scotland” actually includes Ireland.

On the other hand, they are also very specific on pinpointing both my parents locations in England as their English ancestors did not move from their localities for a couple of hundred years.

So if you haven’t done any actual genealogy and don’t have a tree, I really don’t see the point in doing the DNA testing as trying to prove great grandad Frank was German may actually reveal DNA from Scandinavia or Russia depending on which parts of Germany his ancestors came from.

I've got an older relative who told me the other day that he thinks our family is descended from Jesus and that we need to watch our backs (Da Vinci Code style). Obviously I think he's nuts but would it be worth doing a DNA test to see? 🤣

Get him to pay for it for sure!

Who does he say are Jesus' children?

Criminal cases are only looking for DNA matches between the crime and the suspect. We've all got an individual profile so match your profile to the crime and you're guilty.

As you can probably tell from my user name, this is in fact something I know quite a lot about.

DNA tests from Ancestry are not a con. There are two aspects/sides to testing. The first, cousin matching, is what we genealogists are interested in. The testing company will look at your DNA (which is a long string of letters) and look for sections/segments of that long string of letters which match with other people's long string of letters. The more DNA which matches, the closer the relationship. The genetic closeness is measured in centimorgans, and you can use your DNA results ALONGSIDE CONVENTIONAL GENEALOGY to work out what your relationship might be. Sites may suggest possibilities for a match such as "second cousin, half first cousin, first cousin once removed" or whatever but you need to understand what that all means. The sites cannot say with all certainty how two people are related unless it's a very close relationship like parent-child. But lots of people don't understand that.

The ethnicity estimate is the other side of these Ancestry and similar DNA tests and is far more subjective. Genealogists take these estimates with a huge pinch of salt. They were really developed for the North American/Australia/New Zealand market where most people who are exploring their genealogy know that their ancestors originally came from somewhere else. Doing a DNA test helps them target their research - should they be researching records in Ireland, Italy or Greece? The ethnicity results can be fairly accurate, might not be. My own DNA says 12% Irish which would mean one Irish great grandparent (ish) whereas in fact my g grandparents were all born in Scotland, to parents who came to Scotland during the decades before that, but grew up in Scotland and married within their local community - who all had Irish roots too.

A great grandfather is quite distant - you seem to think OP you have been deliberately deceived and almost cheated of potential Jewishness but it's really not like that. Your grandfather may have been told his own father was Jewish and why would he disbelieve that? The family may have been living in a predominantly Jewish area and people have assumed. Or there is an illegitimacy somewhere along the lines.

This is why traditional genealogy and DNA genealogy cannot operate separately. One complements the other. And yes, treat anyone else's tree on Ancestry with the utmost scepticism. Especially those trees which have no sources/documents attached. There are loads out there which are total mince.

It just might be that none of those genes made it down to you. It is completely random which genes are inherited.

Just say your great-grandfather is 100% Jewish. 50% of that is passed down to your grandparent. That means your grandparent has 50% other. Your parent could have inherited the "other", or a small percentage of Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, which you then didn't inherit.

My brother and I are full siblings. We both did those tests and both have some things the other doesn't have. Funnily enough he has some Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, but I have none. Plus he matched with some 3rd cousins that I have no connection to. It's all down to chance.

We had a Maltese great grandmother and this didn't show up much at all when my sister did the test. I don't think it's that accurate.

Exactly @BadNomad . My sister has not tested but although she has 50% from our dad and 50% from our mum, she won't have the same selection of genes that I have. It is very normal for siblings to match with different people which is why often a genealogist will recommend testing a parent, sibling, cousin etc as well to help narrow down matches.

DNA for genealogy is widely misunderstood, people do the test, then get presented with a list of matches expressed as centimorgans which they don't understand, or see "paternal matches" and jump to all sorts of conclusions about their dad not being their dad whereas paternal obviously just means on the father's side.

Haredi are Ashkenazi for the most part in that their family line is Eastern European rather than Spanish or Portuguese (Sephardic) or North African or Middle Eastern (Mizrahi). Haredi refers to their lives in terms of following Halakha far more closely than Modern Orthodox or Reform Jews. Some people say Ultra Orthodox but it's somewhat offensive. Most Haredi families will speak Yiddish as their first/home language

When I started making noises about researching the family tree, a very old uncle said to me 'be careful when you shake those branches, you never know what will fall out'.
And he was right.
Turns out him and his wife (my aunt), who were devout Catholics, had my cousin three years before they eventually got around to be married - and this was in the early 1930s. They are both dead now, so I don't know the story.

They are both dead now, so I don't know the story. Perhaps one of them was already married!

Could be any number of reasons, perhaps he wasnt fully committed and had to be persuaded to marry her, was it during war time, one of them was already married as mentioned or was the marriage record/date incorrect somehow? Is the record of the child correct

I've checked, there's no previous marriage for either of them, and the son was born in 1932, so it wasn't wartime.

And yes, I have all relevant certificates, birth and marriage.

I would test again maybe there was a mix up at the lab.

I had exactly the same. My great grandmother was a Bulgarian Jewish woman. Turns out I have literally no 'foreign' in me.

I did the family true, even got her birth certificate and those of her parents. I can't help wondering why she lied.

I got pregnant as a young unmarried 20 year old. Entire family ( Irish) acted shocked and appalled. Recently did family tree and discovered every single one of them going back to the 19th century was up the duff when they got married. Hypocrites!

@LozengeShaped. Yes I should perhaps start my own thread (sorry to piggyback, OP). But facts are: bio Father dead (his sister just matched with me as Aunt). Bio Mother dead. Her 'youngest brother' has just matched with me as 'half sibling: 75% likely'. I have no contact with that side of family & none possible although I imagine some will be on Ancestry. I have his birth cert - his record shows him as my Mother's younger brother not her son but ages of both allow for either & my family have a history of lying on birth certificates. I need to know who he is.

My grandmother was married briefly and had my dad. Her husband left her and moved to the UK before the war. She never told my father anything about his father, he only saw photos of him after his mother died aged 107. He also found out his father’s mother was Jewish. No a problem but a big surprise when you are 80