Family ties

I tried out one of those DNA tests. Having heard both good and bad things about them and their accuracy, I used the one I felt would be most accurate.

The results were certainly not shocking, but they were surprising.

Tracking them I can actually attach family stories to some of the locations where my DNA shows up, but what it doesn't show was more puzzling.

My family has a whole story about our Ojibwa ancestor and it was relatively recent, after 1790, but there is no trace of it in this DNA kit.

Instead it is mostly (70%)Wales, England and Scotland along with northern Europe (Sweedon, Norway, Germany). And the migration is mostly into the lower Midwest, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky, from Virginia and North Carolina.

I did not join their site, so I can't get in there and explore family trees, but I did discover that I am possibly 4-6th cousins with one of my Facebook friends!

And there is that 1% in Mali that is interesting. I wonder when that happened?

I think, on the whole, what really surprised me were the Nordic connections. Except for an uncle by marriage who was from Holland, I had no idea our family ties went farther north than Germany.

None of this really means anything, but it's fun to dream of who these people were and what their stories might have been.