DNA

I originally tested my DNA with Ancestry.com in April 2015, having asked for the kit for my birthday in March. I got the results, and then uploaded my raw data to another DNA testing site, familytreedna.com, paid another fee to unlock the matches, and then lastly uploaded the raw data to another site, GEDMatch.com. This way my data is in three large databases, and the more databases you are in, the more access to other people who may match you genetically. The other large company that I know of is called 23 & Me, but I haven't tested with them. Perhaps I will one day, but really at this point I would rather spend the money on getting other family members to test. Here are the ethnicity breakdowns I received from Ancestry and FTDNA and a new site that launched this week, DNA.land

All of them agree, I'm pretty European, which is no surprise. I've traced my family lines back to the 1700's for most of them, and everyone (except one, who was from Ireland) is British born. There are vast differences in the percentages though. When I first saw the Ancestry results (which is in the top third of the picture) my heart sank as it said 3% British. How could that be?! Then I looked into the overlaps of the other regions and it started making more sense. Britain was invaded. A lot. So there is a melting pot of DNA roaming around. Vikings, Romans, Normans, Saxons, all lumped together. The ethnicity predictions are a bit of fun, but that's it. They're not much of a clue as to where my ancestors were 500+ years ago, because they could have been British, or one of the many people from elsewhere that ended up in Britain.

New Blog, 1st post. I started looking into my family tree in 2007. I'm not really sure why, maybe it's because I married someone from another country, and was moving back and forth between the United Kingdom (where I am from) and the United States and wanted to remember where I was from, and to give my children a legacy of the two branches they are from. As time has gone on my interest has grown, to the point now where I have a very large family tree (and a separate, equally large one for my husband's ancestors) with many photos and information I may never have known if I had not pursued it. It's been helped greatly by the availability of online records and research, and also from family members giving me information and photographs. This year I took things one step further and submitted a DNA sample to a couple of companies to get analyzed for my ethnicity and also to match with distant relatives, which I have done, there have been some wonderful connections with people from all over the world. The purpose of this blog is to write down some of the stories I have gathered for some of my ancestors and gather them in one place. And if someone stumbles across something that helps in their own research into their tree, all the better.