#MicroblogMondays: Down the rabbit hole :)

(Posting this late, on Tuesday morning!) 

Over the past several years, my mother has been talking about getting her DNA analyzed -- i.e., she wanted ME (the family historian) to procure and organize a DNA test for her!  Her brother (my uncle) and a couple of her cousins & friends have done theirs, and she was curious about what her own results would reveal.  

I knew that if she was going to get hers done, I'd have to (might as well...!)  get mine done too. Until now, I've been on the fence. I knew it would open up a whole bunch of new possibilities for my family tree research... but of course, that can be both a good thing and a bad thing...!  

For one thing, I figured that to get the most out of your results (especially if you have any real interest in genealogy, as I do), you'd have to have a public family tree on Ancestry (true), and I wasn't sure I was ready to make mine public (and deal with a bunch of enquiries). 

Second, I knew that getting these results would send me down a whole bunch of rabbit holes, lol.  Genealogy can be a LOT of fun, but it can also be a HUGE time suck!  

And of course, there's always the chance that you're going to learn something surprising/shocking about yourself, or a family member(s). I wasn't so worried about myself -- anyone who looks at me and looks at my parents knows whose kid I am...!  But (as I think I've mentioned here in the past), I know of at least one family member who had a baby out of wedlock that was relinquished for adoption... that person has other children, and I have no idea what if anything those kids know about their half-sibling.  

But I also knew that the more family members (and closer ones) that you test, the better/more accurate your results are going to be... and my mother is not going to be around forever. I agreed to do it, with a couple of caveats:  (a) if you have anything you need to tell me, tell me NOW!  lol  and (b) if this adopted child (who would now be in their 50s) comes knocking, my mom gets to be the one who calls the biological parent about it!  

So I bought two kits from Ancestry (the company with the largest database, where I have had an account and a private family tree for years) during its Easter sale last spring, and brought them with me to Mom & Dad's when we visited over (Canadian) Thanksgiving last month. I set myself up as Mom's "results manager" (so that I could see her results, respond to any enquiries, etc.).  We took our tests (literally spit in a tube), packaged them up and mailed them while I was there. We were told the results would take about 6-8 weeks to process -- i.e., probably by American Thanksgiving, or mid-December at the latest, just in time for Christmas!  

Well -- my results are still pending (currently due mid-month, although they may come sooner), but Mom got hers on Halloween, Oct. 31st, less than three weeks after we sent them. And since then, almost every point I anticipated has been realized...!  I did wind up making my tree public (and there have been benefits to that, in terms of being able to expand my tree back a generation or more further on several branches). I most definitely have been spending a lot of time wandering down various rabbit holes, checking our matches and trying to figure out how we're all related.  And yes, there have been a few surprises!  

First, the ethnicity estimates. We always were told/said/believed (for quite a while, anyway), that my grandmother was Swedish and my grandfather was Irish, so you'd expect Mom to be roughly half and half, right?  From her mother/Grandma's side, she's actually 32% Swedish/Danish (no Danish reflected in the actual locations, though) -- but also 11% Norwegian (! -- Grandma always made fun of Norwegians -- some inter-regional rivalry there...! -- so I can only imagine what she'd have had to say about THAT...!)  and 7% Finnish. 

On her dad/my Grandpa's side, 21% comes from England/Northwestern Europe, 19% Scotland, just 6% Ireland, and 4% Wales. One of the Scottish cousins I've connected with over the past decade or so (from one branch of my grandfather's family -- there are others that also have Irish history behind them) has always believed that we were part of the "Ulster Plantation," brought over from England & Scotland (mostly in the 1600s) to "colonize" Catholic Ireland with Protestants (which of course has resulted in hundreds of years of conflict).  Almost all of the "Irish" ancestors I've found have been Protestant/"Orange."  It will be interesting to see how these results get reflected in my own (in much smaller percentages, of course).

No sign of the potential family member I was worried might pop up (yet! -- my results are still to come...!) -- but there's been one or two potential matches (not close-close, but first or second cousin level to my mom) that have me going "hmmm...." In a similar vein:  the whispered family story (which one of my great-aunts refused to discuss!) was that my Swedish great-great grandmother arrived in this country with three children (including my great-grandfather) -- and no husband. The scandalous rumour was that each of her three children had a different father. (!)  The one son/brother to my great-grandfather died relatively young, as did his only child/son in his early 20s, ending that line of enquiry -- but a descendant of my great-grandfather's sister is listed in my mother's results/matches, and identified as a "half-cousin" and the sister (my mother's great-aunt) as "half grandaunt." Which means, if I'm interpreting this correctly, the scandalous rumour is true!  ;)  

I have had one person contact me so far about Mom's results -- a third cousin once removed in Australia, who is actually related to another distant cousin I've been in touch with for the past 10 years now. Still, this person was able to add some new information to my tree. 

I still have a LOT to learn about DNA genealogy -- and with more than 800 "close" matches and 19,000 matches for my mom to peruse -- plus my own still to come, of course (including what I've inherited from my father's side of the family).  Now dh is interested in getting his done!  (I can only imagine what a mixture of ethnicities our Katie would have been...!)  I think I'm going to be exploring rabbit holes for quite a while to come...!  (But I love it!) 

Have you had your DNA analyzed?  

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.