After about 2.5 months from the date of ordering to now, I finally got my Ancestry DNA results. While I am not a patient person to begin with, it was my fault in hindsight. I took advantage of the Black Friday sale and placed my order along with a huge amount of other people. This tied with it being given as gifts for Christmas made a huge influx of DNA samples arriving at the lab at the same time which caused longer than normal wait times. If I was to do it again I would choose a time that did not revolve around a big sale period or Christmas.
In this post I detailed the steps from receiving the sample kit to mailing it off. It was really quite easy if you follow the steps. Just don’t pull a Sara and keep forgetting you are not allowed to eat/drink a certain amount of time before providing the sample. I had to restart my timer three times.
I got the email telling me results were ready while I was just opening my eyes the other morning. I always check my emails before I get out of bed but when I saw that my results were in I flew out of bed and started my computer.
And my results were……drumroll please…….
To be honest I had no idea what to expect going in. You hear your parents talking about things over the years so you kind of cobble together some ideas. My dad being adopted left one side of my family blank although we knew his last name before adoption was Abrahamson. This made us believe that there might have been some Scandinavian in there but as you can see Scandinavian is only a small percentage. What I’m truly shocked about is the high percentage of Great Britain, tied with the Irish (I had no idea that I had even a bit of Irish so this was a pleasant surprise) that equates to over 68% of my genetics. It’s pretty crazy that most of my ancestry seems to come from those two neighbouring islands.
When you click on your results you can see each segment in more detail. Each genetic breakdown is shown on the map with different circles radiating out from the strongest point of your genes. The Great Britain gene seems to stretch out to cover Denmark as well which makes sense since my maternal Grandpa’s family seem to come from that area (still trying to figure all this out). I also seem to have a significant portion of Eastern European that doesn’t pinpoint an exact location, which is probably because of all the shifting of borders, countries, and people over the last 2000 years. Because yes, this genetic study goes back as far as 2000 years. I’m currently taking advantage of my 2 weeks free on Ancestry trying to decided if I want to get a membership. I discovered a lot of information on my maternal Grandfather’s side last night to add to my family tree (I thin kI have found ancestors all the way back to 1474 so far) , tonight I am going to try my maternal grandmother. Women aren’t as easy to search as men (unless they were a big part of history, but even sometimes) since they were generally considered property to be passed from father to husband so the searching is a lot more difficult to find records for.
When you do the DNA the site immediately begins to update you on all the genetically connected people that have also taken the test (it also updates every time a new connection arrives in the lab). They range from close family, all the way to 8-10th cousins (which are not as easy to find connections and prove you are related). I have 93 people who are listed as 4th cousins or closer so far. One of those connections is for a second cousin, which was shocking to me and through my quick and poor investigative searching I believe that this person may be from my dad’s unknown side. This is very exciting for me as well as him to finally have some information. I am looking forward to see how much I can dive into this.
I think one of the most interesting parts is that while I knew I was European, I didn’t realize that I was almost genetically full blood European. 99% to be exact with 1% to break that up from the Caucasus. So much history comes from this area like the Trojan War (Homer’s Illiad), The Battle of Thermopylae with Xerxes, Constantinople, the Crusades. The history lover in me wonders if that 1% possibly came from some big historical event that I have read about. I’ll probably never know, but it is fun to think about.
Have you ever had any success using Ancestry to find out your family history? How far back were you able to go?
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