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Old 02-14-2018, 08:33 AM
 
Location: Leeds, UK
22,139 posts, read 29,449,828 times
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My paternal grandfather was born in Jamaica and migrated to the UK in the 1960s, and my father is mixed race and British-born - but my mother is white as snow, and a natural redhead with freckles. My surname is Irish, so I think that's probably where my mother's side of the family largely originated from - but it must go back many, many years because no recent relatives were born in Ireland (or anywhere other than England for that matter). The obsession with ancestry and DNA isn't really as prevalent in Europe as it is in the US, and I can't say I have any affiliation with Jamaica (though some of their food is quite nice - and my city has an annual West Indian carnival which is always fun). I've only ever considered myself British (and English to a much lesser extent).


My skin is light enough that most people just think I'm Mediterranean or something. I'm actually thankful for my mixed heritage because it means I can tan in the summer while my poor mother just burns.

Last edited by dunno what to put here; 02-14-2018 at 08:46 AM..
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Old 02-14-2018, 09:18 AM
 
16,579 posts, read 20,602,195 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JanND View Post
I'm sorry for your situation. Would be hard to know between you and your brother which of you should be looking for your real father.

Perhaps you and your brother should take another test with bth of you using the same company just to be sure.

And, maybe I am not as enlightened, but I always thought being Jewish was a religion not an ethnicity?
Thank you and it is a strange situation, but it's not devastating for me like I imagine it would be for some people. I loved my father and he was a good dad, but I never felt super close to him. He was a WWII vet and a functioning alcoholic and pretty closed off as a person. We had very few heart-to-heart moments.

And you're right that it's hard to know which of us may have a different father. It's possible that we both have different fathers. The dad who raised us was shot in the low hip area during WWII and my mother told me that doctors at the time told him that he would not be able to have children. She said they were surprised when she got pregnant.

I'm going to do another test on Ancestry.com and see if I can find DNA relatives there who have family trees. That may shed some light on things.

And I'm not really sure on the whole Jewish DNA thing and religion v. ethnicity, but I bet someone on here can shed some light on that. I'm guessing that it's because European Jews were insular for a long time and thus share DNA that others don't. I just know that my results say I'm 50% Ashkenazi Jew and my daughter is 25%.
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Old 02-14-2018, 09:22 AM
 
Location: Phoenix, AZ
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I get a kick out of anti-semites that find out they have Jews in their ancestry.
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Old 02-14-2018, 09:27 AM
 
17,264 posts, read 11,082,017 times
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Originally Posted by adjusterjack View Post
I get a kick out of anti-semites that find out they have Jews in their ancestry.
I don't know why. I'd be rather proud if I had some Jewish lineage. Their history goes back to the times of the Pharaohs and is fascinating. In school, the Jewish kids were always among the smartest too
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Old 02-14-2018, 09:28 AM
 
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Originally Posted by adjusterjack View Post
I get a kick out of anti-semites that find out they have Jews in their ancestry.
Like Hitler? Knowing his ancestry didn't make any difference to his anti-semitic views.
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Old 02-14-2018, 09:53 AM
 
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My bio dad is a sperm donor. I was expecting all sorts of random stuff in my DNA results as members of various ethnic groups have occasionally assumed I was a fellow member - I figured I was a typical Heinz 57 American.

Nope. As I tell people, if I was any whiter I'd be transparent. One tenth of one percent is Sub-Saharan African and one-tenth of one percent is "Yakut" which is apparently some random Turkic group. Everything else is Northern European, though the 4% Scandinavian was a little bit of a surprise. I do have more Neanderthal genes than 75% of the population though, whatever that means.

It IS pretty funny when people get angry at science or invest so much of their identity in their assumed genetic background. Develop an identity of your own based on who you are as a person, not who you think your ancestors were, for God's sake.
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Old 02-14-2018, 09:58 AM
 
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Originally Posted by marino760 View Post
I don't know why. I'd be rather proud if I had some Jewish lineage. Their history goes back to the times of the Pharaohs and is fascinating. In school, the Jewish kids were always among the smartest too
I don't know if you've followed my little saga in this thread or not, but 23andMe says I'm 50% Ashkenazi Jew and also revealed that my brother whom I believed to be a full sibling is a half sibling and has no Jewish heritage. That has led me to tentatively conclude that my mother had an extra-marital relationship with a Jewish man. Both my parents are deceased so there's no one to ask or test.

Fast forward 34 years. My husband and I met in a totally random way and I didn't know anything about him. But he has black hair and a large nose and he's from New Jersey. When I was describing him to my mom (because I was excited about meeting him and we had plans to go out), I said that he might be Jewish. At that point my mother was a sweet, 70-something little old lady, and she said, "Oh! They're very smart!" I thought it was cute at the time, but now wonder if she was thinking about a Jewish paramour!

And my husband's DNA test showed no Jewish heritage.
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Old 02-14-2018, 10:15 AM
 
7,489 posts, read 4,886,719 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Marlow View Post
I don't know if you've followed my little saga in this thread or not, but 23andMe says I'm 50% Ashkenazi Jew and also revealed that my brother whom I believed to be a full sibling is a half sibling and has no Jewish heritage. That has led me to tentatively conclude that my mother had an extra-marital relationship with a Jewish man. Both my parents are deceased so there's no one to ask or test.

Fast forward 34 years. My husband and I met in a totally random way and I didn't know anything about him. But he has black hair and a large nose and he's from New Jersey. When I was describing him to my mom (because I was excited about meeting him and we had plans to go out), I said that he might be Jewish. At that point my mother was a sweet, 70-something little old lady, and she said, "Oh! They're very smart!" I thought it was cute at the time, but now wonder if she was thinking about a Jewish paramour!

And my husband's DNA test showed no Jewish heritage.
I have to admit that I find it very odd that DNA can identify religion.
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Old 02-14-2018, 10:19 AM
 
16,212 posts, read 10,739,934 times
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Originally Posted by dc1538 View Post
I was referencing to people related to me and what I most often see as their ancestry African ancestry. The ones who are closer to the 73% tend to trend older if they have the profile pictures up. I was surprised myself, since it seemed that several studies seem to indicate the mid 70% range for the average African-American. In my case though, honestly, most of my African-American relatives fall in the 80-85% range when I look at their ancestry profile. Sometimes I wonder if the overall data is somewhat skewed due to the fact that a lighter skinned African American who likely be more curious of their ancestry than someone who is dark skinned. They also would likely have less African ancestry than someone who was darker, although it's not always the case. If I'm correct the study in the link used data from 23&me. So it's using voluntary data, which could potentially skew results.
Wanted to note on this, that I am in my 30s and am black American and recently bit the bullet and got the test done to confirm some research and a potential distant 5th great grandmother being a shared ancestor between someone I "met" on ancestry.

I am about 73% African as well. I also run in a lot of black American genealogical circles. Ironically those older and who have more southern slavery roots, usually are more African. I'm trying to get a cousin of mine to test who is from SC and is over 100 years old. I have an inkling that she would be 100% African. A large amount of SC black Americans in my genealogical circles are between 90%-100% African and most of them are older people. Those older who have more "free people of color" (FPOC) ancestry are usually less than 70% African.

There are over 50,000 members of the groups I belong to whereas members predominantly black America and most of us do fall in the 73% range of African ancestry because of slavery and Jim Crow era rape (and it was more common than people realize, white men could rape black women with no repercussions and people whose trees I have done, a huge amount of them have occurrence such as this in their trees, usually it is due to a woman/teenage girl working as a domestic in a white persons home and she falls pregnant and gives birth to a half black/half white child and the family lore was that she was raped. My husband has a couple of incidences of this in his family as well). However, there were also consensual relationships between black and white people, I've seen this especially in my Great Lakes ancestors. I was a significant amount of Irish/Scottish ancestry (20%). I am aware of the people on my paternal side who were Irish/Scottish as they were inter-racial couples from rather recent unions (from the late 19th century/early 20th century) but feel there is probably some from my maternal side as well.


Quote:
Originally Posted by dc1538 View Post
Out of the 1200+ relatives I have on 23&me I think I've seen only one white relative with a significant amount of sub-Saharan African DNA. Ironically it was 8% just like the lady in the news article. Most results show as 99%+ European. I have seen many .1% and a few 1-2% sub-Saharan African results among white relatives. My maternal great-great grandma was most likely mixed and has the mysterious background and 'native american' heritage but I'm pretty positive she was a black/white mixture. She was born in the early 1900's

Ironically I've only seen about 2 black relatives at 90%+ sub-Saharan African. Most fall into the 80-85% range.
Of my relatives who've tested, nearly all of us fall in the 50-75% range of African ancestry. I honestly thought I would be closer to the 50% mark because of my known white ancestry on both sides of the family.

My maternal grandfather was also tested (he is in his late 80s) and he was only 66% African. His maternal side have a lot of "free" ancestry and are from a "tri-racial" group who many consider themselves descendants of the indigenous population of America. He was a little over 1% Amerindian as well based on Eurogenes via Gedmatch,

I have a very large amount of "white" cousins who I actually know in real life who didn't know they were part black/African until they took a DNA test (they didn't know of our side of the family due to a family argument over money and those family members never speaking to the rest of the family again). They range between 5-20% black/African and are from the paternal line I mentioned above with known Irish/Scottish ancestry. Their great grandparents were the aunts/uncles and/or brothers/sisters of one of my paternal great grandmothers who was the most "black" looking person in that side of the family who most people who saw her thought was white. She never officially "passed" for white but she did tell me of how everyone at her job were shocked that she had married a "negro" when she brought my dark skinned great grandfather to a company picnic back in the early 1970s. She had never really spoken about her race at work because back then they didn't have you fill out forms or anything to get jobs and she said it never came up in conversation. She'd been working there for over 15 years by that time and her co-workers always thought she was white lol. She told them at the picnic that she was a negro too and said that for some people it was shocking! Many of my newly found white cousins were very upset that their family in our hometown had been kept from them and we joke that we could have gotten together and committed some incest against our knowledge.
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Old 02-14-2018, 11:55 AM
 
834 posts, read 737,003 times
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Originally Posted by Lieneke View Post
I have to admit that I find it very odd that DNA can identify religion.
It's identifying an ethnicity, the Ashkenazi people or Sephardic or whatever other lines. Not the religion. It was an ethnoreligious group, converts will be Jewish, but they can never be genetically Ashkenazi, unless they have some of that lineage of course, and then profile not full.

I had a hard time with this too when it was in our DNA results. The way I understand it now, having Ashkenazi DNA doesn't make you religiously Jewish unless your mother was considered religiously Jewish.

It's like being genetically Irish or Spanish or Vietnamese.
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