DNA, Genealogy and Who ARE We?

My uncle had his DNA “done” recently and to the shock of my Sicilian relatives, we’re Greek.

Oh, not 100% Greek.

He’s only 53% Greek, but it shocked us, none the less.

That means my generation is “only” 26.5% Greek, but that’s higher than the others for me.

“You don’t really take that seriously, do you?” My sister-in-law asked.

Of course not.

But it’s interesting.

Family stories

I’ve been an amateur genealogist since I wrote my first family history in 1990.

We celebrated my maternal grandfather’s 100th birthday that year.

Since I lived far away, I interviewed relatives and wrote a joint biography of him and my grandmother.

It was my first venture into historical writing.

As a lover of history and with a strong inclination to put facts into context, I read up on the Sicilian experience.

My grandfather came to the United States in 1908, when he was 18 years old.

His mind was intact until his death at the age of 102 years, 11 months.

Grandpa wasn’t much of a talker, but he had so many stories!

I’m an American citizen because of his service in the US Army during World War I, for instance.

He remembered seeing his first airplane (the Wright Brothers’ plane in Chicago), remembered when the Russian Czar Nicholas II was murdered (1918), and voted in every presidential election.

He was a proud American and only returned to Italy in 1956 when he inherited property that needed to be sold.

What does DNA have to do with it?

Nothing.

Something.

My Sicilian mother had “untypeable blood” according to the UCLA hospital in the 1950’s.

“What does that even mean?” she asked her doctors.

“We don’t know. We’ll mark “O” and hope you never need a transfusion.”

She never needed one.

My father, a history lover, would have loved to hear about the Greek DNA.

As he explained long ago, “Sicily was overrun by so many marauders, her blood easily could be a mixture of many races.”

Sicily was the breadbasket of Greece a long time ago. My Sicilian great-grandfather farmed for a wealthy landowner who lived far away.

All sorts of nationalities took advantage of that strategically placed island continually booted about by the Italian mainland.

DNA results

My distant cousins in the genealogy world encouraged us to have our DNA tested several years ago.

They were hunting for confirmation of specific lines from colonial Virginia and Maryland.

This particular test gave me the names of distant cousins.

Searching through the very lengthy list, I was shocked to see Russian and Scandinavian names.

I puzzled over the results for quite some time.

HOW were the Russians involved? Would these have been sea traders who visited Sicily?

But that didn’t make any sense, particularly when I didn’t see any names that looked Italian.

And why wasn’t I seeing the names of third and fourth cousins whom I actually knew?

When I asked the fifth-cousin who had urged me to do the testing, he laughed.

“We obviously inherited more genes from the non-similar family lines.”

But Russian and Scandinavian?

Oh, wait!

We always said I took after my Danish grandmother more than my Sicilian one!

Her family left Denmark circa 1870, yet similar DNA threaded through my lines and that of people far, far away.

So what?

It means nothing to my everyday life.

I don’t like ouzo or even olives.

I’ve only a cursory knowledge of Greece, though we certainly admired Agrigento in Sicily!

But knowing my family comes from all over helps me look at the world differently.

At the moment, family members have married people from Columbia, Italy, Germany, Indonesia, and of Hungarian, Slovenian and Pakistani descent.

It means a piece of my heart belongs to lands and cultures I’ve never visited (Pakistan and Indonesia at the moment).

I love people from those countries, or at least their descendants. I can’t be xenophobic about my own land.

So, this Thanksgiving we’ll embrace a new window into who we are: a “mutt” mixture, as my father used to say.

It’s not the nationality that’s important–it’s who we are as a family.

No matter what the DNA says!

Hey! Make sure you take family stories to Thanksgiving celebrations this year! You never know what you’ll discover!

Tweetables

DNA and Genealogy: something to discuss at Thanksgiving! Click to Tweet

Do you really know where your ancestors came from? DNA surprise!  Click to Tweet