Ancestry DNA shock result

[rageagainstthemachine72]

My daughter did a dna test, results came back 25% Italian. I thought that's weird, that must mean one of her parents is half italian, so I did a test, yes you guessed it I'm 48% Italian and my two sisters who tested years ago came up as half sisters. Devastated, mum died two years ago and the man who I thought was my father died over 30 years ago. Not really sure what I'm looking for regarding this post, just some support and anyone out there with similar stories.

@rageagainstthemachine72. Yes I had very dark almost black hair and brown eyes. I actually have similar colouring to my dad and do not believe for a second my mum had a fling with another man, I have come to the conclusion my dad was swapped at birth in the maternity hospital. He was born in 1909 ( I’m 72), and from listening to ‘The Gift’, I know it’s happened much more than one would ever imagine. Glad all this is helping. I am on a Facebook site called DNA NPE Surprises. (Non Parental Surprises) which is a nice friendly group with occasional online meetings and even face to face ones. There are other similar DNA support groups on fb.

same

I hate this DNA testing trend. It throws up so many problems and can blow up families. Why would anyone voluntarily do it?

Worth knowing that with Ancestry you can download your DNA and upload it to other search sites. I found this out on Mumsnet and as a result I found my birth father and family on Heritage. Good luck.

Um, to find their family??

@rageagainstthemachine72 I just saw your dad was born in Dublin- well so was mine! All my dad’s relatives are Scottish but his parents just happened to be in Dublin at the time of his birth.

This must be really difficult for you OP. I can imagine how destabilising it is.

I know we have a "family secret", my paternal grandfather's brother fathered a child outside of his marriage, I guess in the of 40's or 50's. The descendants of that family are in the US and several years ago one made contact with the researchers at our local museum looking for relatives. In this scenario the father or grandfather of the person making contact has chosen to keep his parentage secret and there were at the time too many older relatives who would have been impacted. We chose not to share the info taking the view that it wasn't our secret to tell. I imagine with DNA testing becoming more prolific this will come back and I'm very happy to welcome new relatives - we've got lots already so a few more is fine!

I will do my DNA testing at some point, I don't doubt my parentage but I'm interested in what it throws up further back to use alongside family history tracing now I've got time.

I don't doubt that there are many families where all wasn't as it should be for many reasons.

I only did it to find out if I was more Scottish or Irish and to find out about the Italian was a big shock! I’m glad I did it though otherwise I’d never have known.

But that family may not want to be found! You cannot assume they'll be happy to have a bomb dropped into their midst. Not everyone can be open about past relationships.

I thought that! I wonder if this search involves any gelato in Rome or risotto in Milan! I realise it is a shock but maybe in time you can have fun with it op.

I vehemently discourage anyone to seek DNA testing without very good reason. Not only does it bring about shocks like this - and I have to question whether it would have been any easier if your mother had still be around to discuss - it is so easy to make judgements based on life today rather than life at the time. Perhaps your father never knew? Perhaps it was assault? Who knows. Best left as a quirk whilst you move on.

I know this is has been a terrible shock. It will take time for that to ease.

I started my DNA journey many years ago and much has fallen out of the closet, so to speak, but the truth and seeing the bigger picture have been helpful to me. I excepted to have 25% Portuguese DNA, but didn't have any!

I went on to help a friend with their DNA a couple of years ago. He found out his father wasn't who he thought, but didn't know who he was or where to look and was told a made-up story by his (half) brother which was upsetting. To help him, I built a tree in Ancestry, starting with a pair of ancestors many of his distant DNA cousins had in common. I added as many descendants on as many branches as I could, mapped the DNA matches onto that, and was able to work out which branch his father was on from the amount of DNA he shared with each distant cousin. Ultimately I found his father was a GI in England while being sent home at the end of WW", and had passed away decades before. My friend is now in touch with his paternal half siblings in America. His paternal family isn't a replacement family, he loves the family he's had all his life, but this is an additional one that's brought additional joy to his life and he can now make sense of and understand the events around his birth.

Before doing anything, if you do anything, it can be helpful to speak with support groups as others have said so that you are ready for whatever you might find or not find. I wish you every happiness and hope the initial shock will ease for you.

The ancestry thing ie where someone is from is based on data that is changing regularly so is unlikely at this point to be 100% accurate. But matching DNA to familial matches... yup, its accurate. Which is why DNA testing is used in forensic analysis and research.

Needless to say, my DC both match each other as siblings, and both me and DH as parents. Becuase we are. It's not complicated.

The further away the relationship is, the more difficult it gets to be properly accurate. So you get lots of things like, "half second cousin or third cousin once removed" or whatever, but that's when you share much less DNA.

I understand if it's adopted children looking for their birth families, but if you grew up thinking your parents are your parents - then why do it?

So many reasons. For those of us interested in genealogy it can be a very reliable tool for tracking down distant relatives and working out your family tree. Confirming what the records tell you, or making links where no records exist. Many test takers (me included) have not found anything unexpected within their close families. Around 30 million people across the world have taken an Ancestry test.

As for "they're not reliable" - well that just demonstrates more misunderstanding. Yes, the ethnicity estimate is not reliable, it's like the horoscope of genealogy. My ethnicity estimate is that I am 26% Irish which some people would interpret as one Irish grandparent. Not the case as I have no Irish-born ancestors at even great grandparent level. I do have lots of Ayrshire ancestry though and Ancestry's "Ireland" circle includes some of that too.

What IS reliable is the cousin matching and the centimorgans. People who just do the DNA tests for the "ethnicity estimate" often have never even heard the word centimorgan or understand what it means. If a DNA test shows that you share DNA with someone (at a reasonable level) then you are related. That is not up for interpretation. The numbers are the numbers. There are sites such as the Shared Centimorgan Project which allow you to enter the number of shared centimorgans and the site suggests the most probable relationship. So for example if you share 1250 cM with a match, there is a probability of 72% that they are a first cousin, great grandparent, a great grandchild, half nephew etc. You can probably rule out some of the possibilities by age. It is a massive myth that Ancestry or any other site can reliably tell you the exact relationship between you and another user - unless that relationship is very close and unless you both have built proper family trees on the site.

@AuntieBiotics It just baffles me that we're meant to be so careful with how much information we share about ourselves online, yet people voluntarily upload their DNA profiles to various websites. Can't that information then be stolen and used by anyone?

I watched too many true crime documentaries where these websites were used to solve historic murders. Why would you want to have the most personal information possible about yourself online?

Sorry this has happened. It must be a shock.

I joined 23andME when it first started hoping to learn more about health but the most rewarding bit has been helping people who contact me trying to find their place in the family.

Some know that they are adopted but for others it's been a shock to see a whole lot of matches to names they don't recognise.

My male ancestors were seafarers and some really did have a girl in every port.

Because they were away at sea for long periods of time they could even come back home to another baby and it appeared to be commonly accepted.
One person contacted me to say that it solved a family mystery. Their GM had been widowed and married again and it appears that all of her existing children were related to husband 2. They were never told though.

It can take years of waiting though until someone related gets tested and the results suddenly appear and make sense.

That's why some people upload their data to as many websites as they can.
One adopted daughter waited 8 years until a close match finally appeared.
There are tools that can be run on the data (from different sources) to calculate possible relationships. I'm rusty on this now sorry.

If the target family comes from an area that the population is stable and everyone "knows" their family tree then it could be a wait for someone to test and supply answers elsewhere.

That's why the detective work may need to be closer to home. Holidays, family friends, italian businesses close to where she lived. Local directories and records. Local Facebook pages. School photos.

I note on my own % that the geograhical areas keep changing (only roughly) every time the website(s) update their data. Also their guess as to when these ancestors contributed genes. It's an ongoing process as more people worldwide get tested.

I agree. There is no way I would give my DNA information to strangers.

I think that a family is the one that were there for you as you grew up, bathed your scratched knees, sat in uncomfortable chairs to wonder at your 15 seconds of Nativity glory, cheered your goals, runs etc., offered a shoulder to cry on for your disappointments and so on, the rest is just biology. Lots of children are adopted with no 'blood family' yet they are loved. I know that there are a few cases where the family hasn't been good for them or there are medical complications but finding out what happened to people who are long dead seems pointless. Through the 1911 Census my husband discovered things about his grandmother and that at least one of her children might have come about as droit de seigneur when she was a servant in a big house, we had an hour of fun visiting the house and looking for likeness in their family photos though!

Good points, @AuntieBiotics.
It's not a definite that the OP has a certain % of Italian DNA. It does depend on what basis they're working from.
Also, Italy as we know it has only existed for about 150 years, so that's a broad claim anyway.

"How do these DNA tests work"

There is a very good explanation here:

https://www.ancestry.co.uk/c/dna-learning-hub/autosomal-dna-testing

"are they 100% reliable?"

For determining if you are (or are not) related to a particular person, yes, most definitely.

To say where your family comes from, not so much.

Well my "DNA Information" is just a long list of numbers. I'm not quite sure what "they" would do with it. It's a choice, like anything else in this life, like having an Instagram account, using Mumsnet, being on the public electoral register or not.

And no, the Police in this country will not come knocking as it is against the law in the UK to use commercial DNA databases to solve crimes. Whether that is looking for a perpetrator, or trying to solve abandoned baby cases. The police are only allowed to look for familial matches on their own database of DNA taken from people who have been arrested/charged. There is loads of information and legislation on the government website about how the police forensic service do this, and in what circumstances they would allow access from foreign police.

This for me too. There are "puzzles" on my side of my family, not my parents generation, further back, and also puzzles on my late husband's side, stories told by his mother. He decided that he did not want to investigate and I agreed with him about my own family.

I am not saying that nobody should, its their choice but I think there sould be more awareness of the fact that you may find out things you didn't want to know. I also get that people can be shocked and hurt by what they find but surely there have been enough similar stories that anyone would consider the possibility before entering into it?

"...but finding out what happened to people who are long dead seems pointless."

It may well seem so to you, but there are many people who find it an interesting and useful activity.

Ancestry is probably the largest company and they have upwards of three million paying subscribers (although most are probably in the USA). Other sites like MyHeritage have around one million paying subscribers.

So, there's four million people just there who are paying to trace their family tree.

Personally, I find any number of hobbies or pastimes to be rather pointless, but I accept that they appeal to the people that engage in them. And who am I to denigrate somebody just because they enjoy a hobby or pastime that I don't see the point of?

First of all: I am really sorry, that sounds incredibly difficult. And I am not denying the validity of your perspective.
And yes, a world without those kinds of secrets - and without the circumstances that lead to those secrets existing in the first place! - would be ideal. I would still urge people to be cautious and to have certain conversations with family members before doing one of those test (if possible).

Let‘s say I were to find out that my mother has no genetic ties to her father. What now? Maybe she already had suspicions but very consciously decided to never pursue those? Or maybe she was completely happy not knowing and had never even considered that she might have a different biological father? And what about other people using these services to connect to their genetic family members and discovering their new relatives? Does my right to know (and connect with bio family) trump my mother‘s rights to not know? Her right to privacy and to not have her information (via her daughter aka me) shared with other platform users?

one of my grandmothers concealed her father’s identity until she was in her 80ies and whilst I am sad that she ever felt the need to do so? I believe that this was her right and I wouldn’t have wanted to take that away from her…