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I would add that, until yesterday, I never knew that I had a black ancestor. And yet, throughout all my life, since I was like, 12, I've championed the cause of black people, been drawn to them, loved them, fought for them, written in their behalf and felt passionately the injustice of racism.
How can my behavior be linked to knowledge that I did not possess until yesterday, in my 63rd year of life?
This is the genealogy forum and this topic is about DNA, so naturally we are discussing ethnicity, not nationality. They are not one in the same. Obviously, my nationality is American, but my heritage and genetic ethnicity is mostly British, Italian, German, and Norwegian. It's there, in my blood, and no amount of denial or confusing ethnicity with nationality will remove it. Do you have anything useful to actually contribute about genetic ethnicity? If not, I wonder why you even bothered to open the genealogy section, open this topic, and respond?
Let's not be mean to each other, or jump to conclusions? That person might just have been expressing a general sense of the inclusiveness of all humanity. I think we all need to quit reacting in an unkind fashion to people, at least with such immediacy.
Of course, "Native American" refers to those people who were already living on this continent when the Europeans arrived. Everyone knows that.
It was discussed in another thread why some white-looking people are drawn to NA culture and want the ancestry. That this occurs because of a feeling of closeness to the land is a great idea; my theory always was that some people feel having NA ancestry is romantic and somehow, powerful.
I was told (by my family, my mother specifically), however, that my great-grandmother was Choctaw, and there is a "Rainwater" on my dad's side, in an old family Bible. However, my DNA results have zero mention of this:
98.9% European
Northern European
35.1% British & Irish
3.1% French & German
0.2% Scandinavian
0.1% Finnish
51.2% Nonspecific Northern European
9.2% Nonspecific European
0.5% South Asian
0.2% Sub-Saharan African
0.1% West African
0.1% Nonspecific Sub-Saharan African
0.4% Unassigned
100% My Name
It seems, essentially, I paid $100 to find out I'm a white girl. I guess the NA looks I thought I had, and that my cousins definitely have, are more a reflection of maybe Black Irish, or something.
Someone told me, however, that it may be that the results don't show any NA ancestry because the data on that is very scarce.
The Scandinavian and Finnish were a surprise. But how long ago was that? I'm just really not sure how to interpret all this data.
Interestingly, I've been contacted by a score of third and fourth cousins, one branch of which is African American. We have no idea about my dad's side of the family: his father and his brother, my dad's uncle, were literally "left at the doorstep" of some family after all my paternal family were killed by a flood on or near the Mississippi River. This family treated these two boys like slaves, nearly working them to death, and both of left home as soon as they were old enough to get out on their own. Very rough life back then.
I would be proud to be African-American, if that is the case. None of us have any of those characteristics, however, and I'm thinking it's in-laws, but the data is so complicated and I really don't understand it and haven't got the time to figure it out. After all, Beethoven was 1/8 black, his grandfather from Northern Africa; and the composer had curly, black hair, brown eyes and a large, flat nose. Octoroon, I think is what they called it.
I would add that, until yesterday, I never knew that I had a black ancestor. And yet, throughout all my life, since I was like, 12, I've championed the cause of black people, been drawn to them, loved them, fought for them, written in their behalf and felt passionately the injustice of racism.
How can my behavior be linked to knowledge that I did not possess until yesterday, in my 63rd year of life?
I'm not sure how to read these results. How much ancestoral lineage do you have that is black?
2% I made the error of conflating the last three entries when the last two were actually indented subsets of the first one.
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