Deoxyribonucleic Acid DNA

For probably the great majority of people, we know who our ancestors  are and where they came from.  I knew that my mother's family was all from Cordenons, Italy.  I knew that both sides of my father's family were from towns in what is now Poland, but I never knew exactly where.  I had been told that my grandfather was from Lodz, but he was actually from the Lomza Province.  Hey, they both start with the letter L.  And years ago when I found his immigration information on the ship's manifest, it said he was from Rustok, Russia.  Even though I have an old 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica and I have Googled for the town, it does not seem to ever have existed.  My grandmother's family was a real mystery cause no one ever talked about it and my great-grandmother never spoke English.  You can do that when you live in a city (Hamtramck) inside the Detroit borders where everyone and everything is Polish.  

And so we come to DNA.  For me it was just a curiosity to see if I was really half Italian and half Polish.  The first results I got from Ancestry said I was not Italian at all.  At the time, those Northern Italians got lumped in with the Eastern Europeans.  As Ancestry got more results from more people, they updated the findings and I am now 20% Northern Italian.  Add to that 54% Eastern European-Russian, 7% Balkans, 6% German, 6% French, 5% Scottish and 2% Baltics.  If you tell me to go back to where I came from, I would be on tour.

DNA is not perfect in identifying all of your relatives who have been tested.  I have matches with some cousins, but not their siblings.  Some second cousins show up as distant cousins.  Since I have cousins from one line of the family marry a cousin from another line, DNA does not always predict the right relationship.  

Of my 6,246 matches, only 188 appear as fourth cousins or closer.  And the only way to figure out how we are related is if they have made a family tree.  Some of them never do and if they use account names like 'greeneyes', or never look at their account, you never will know who they are.

But the main reason a lot of people get tested is because they are trying to discover who a parent or grandparent is.  Or siblings they never knew about.  When I first got my results on Ancestry, a young woman in Hawaii contacted me and asked if I might know who her grandfather was.  She had already contacted another cousin of mine, but the person he suggested just did not make sense in the time line of events.  So I put on my detective hat and started looking.  And I struck gold.  Now, I told her who I thought her grandfather could be based on our shared results, where her mother was born and where the grandfather was at the time.  She agreed it was a distinct possibility.  And no sooner had we talked about it than one of his daughters decided to be tested.  Now this daughter lives in New Zealand and she and I had been sharing a few messages.  I contacted the cousin in Hawaii to ask what the results showed in her DNA matches and she said the DNA of his daughter proves my hunch was right.  My cousin in New Zealand stopped sending me messages and has never gone back on her account.  Shocked?  Maybe.

Just recently one of my cousins here in Michigan asked if I knew who a match was that we shared.  I told her it was one of her uncle's illegitimate daughters.  She said it made sense based on what she had heard about him.

And within the last few weeks, a young woman contacted me and asked if she could see my tree.  My tree is private and if you see some tree information in a search and wish to view it, Ancestry will tell you to contact me.  She told me she had recently discovered who her father was and saw that her grandfather, my sixth cousin, might be in my tree.  I, of course, gave her access.  Recently she let me know that her father and his wife are very upset that she found out.  Her half-siblings will not reply to her requests for information.  I feel bad but can do nothing.  Family drama at its finest.

Folks have told me they would never get their DNA tested.  I get it.  Sometimes I think folks just don't want to know.  But I am happy to help when someone is searching for answers.  A cousin in Pennsylvania who found me on Ancestry thanked me for allowing her access to my tree.  Her grandparents had a falling out with the family and were shunned and kicked out of the community.  She never knew anything about them.  But DNA matches and family trees can open up very wide doors and windows into our past.  We just have to be sure we want all the dust that might blow in.  

My only surprises were in finding out how many cousins in Pennsylvania were there when I was growing up.  And are still there.  Though my mother kept in contact with a few of the families - all on my father's side of the family - I don't ever remember hearing about them.  I always thought I grew up in a close-knit family, but in reality, it was just first cousins.  Plenty though there were on both sides, there were just so many more.  And I am very happy I have found them through DNA.