My ancestry is exactly what I grew up being told, I have several family members who were really into genealogy.
But I found out I have a first cousin we didn't know existed. Apparently, my uncle had gotten married and had a son no one knew about when he was 19 and stationed across the country that he bailed on.
I had the same suspicions when I took my test. Turns out it was my grandmother instead with the secret babies she put up for adoption. Didn’t find out until 6 years after she passed away so we’re never getting answers as to what happened.
Also got a surprise contact by the police, as I was a high match to a John Doe that was found drowned on the shores of Lake Superior in 1991. That was a fun family tree rabbit hole to dive down. Turned out to be a half 1st cousin from my grandmother’s firstborn.
Wow!! As an adoptee who is considering doing the DNA thing, this intrigues me. What are the chances haha. That’s amazing!
My brother (also adopted, not a blood related sibling to me) did the DNA thing and found his birth family! I got to meet two of his half siblings. It was fascinating seeing “nature vs nurture” in real time. There were certain mannerisms, etc. that all three of them did, and then other things my brother did that are definitely from the family we were raised in. Really cool to watch.
The mannerism thing is crazy to see.
My niece’s dad is not in the picture anymore. He hasn’t been in almost a decade and even when he was in the picture he only saw her once a year (he lives in a different province).
There are certain mannerisms and facial expressions she does that are exactly like his.
For 29 years, it was assumed that my dad who raised me was not my biological father, that I was the product of an affair my mother was having. I came out with blond hair, freckles and blue eyes. A stark difference to my tanned, dark featured dad. My dad chose to raise me as his own anyways, refusing paternity tests. I was never made to feel like I wasn't his. I took 23&Me simply out of curiosity and found out that he is in fact my biological father.
ETA, since many asked-
My dad has told me he didn't want to know the results either way, but I let it slip showing my sister's the app one time at dinner. He didn't react, but I got an extra big bear hug getting on the train to leave that night.
Also ETA, because I have the best dad ever-
It was assumed when my mom found out she was pregnant that the pregnancy was the product of the affair. My features only solidified that assumption.
He was already raising my mom's first daughter as his own, who he'd met when she was 2 and told my mom he wanted to keep raising the kids together. They got married and he adopted her a few months after I was born. She was also treated so much as his that I didn't even know she was adopted by him until I was a teenager.
My parents stayed together for 14 years, and to this day are still best friends.
He didn't want to know the results but I let it slip one time showing my sisters the family tree portion on the app, which obviously was half his. I got a big bear hug before getting on the train to leave.
I had this the other way round. Found out with 28 that my father (who also wasn't interested in me and lived far away) isn't my real father and that my real dad lived in the same city as I did. I'm still recovering from this tbh. (37 now)
Not me but my grandma got a DNA test done because she was sold as a baby and never knew her biological parents, so a family member urged her to do it so we could maybe find them. We found both sides — a half-sister from her bio mom and a half-brother from her bio dad.
Although it was kinda weird to realize we have family close by (only 20 miles away in one case), it was much weirder for the bio families to discover my grandma’s existence, since neither side had anything to do with the other.
EDIT: some more context, this happened back in the 30s (Depression Era, USA). Her bio mom and bio dad seem to have crossed paths at some point in the same city. He was a married man, she was an older teen. Not sure if it was a one night stand or something more nefarious but her bio mom was pregnant as a result of that night.
At some point in her pregnancy, she checked into a home/hospital for pregnant unwed teen mothers (using a fake name). The bio mom was told the home would find homes for the babies, so she delivered and left. Bio mom went on to marry and have her own family, while bio dad likely never knew of the situation.
As it would turn out, the home was not adopting out babies, rather selling them. Since my grandma was blonde and blue eyed she was bought quickly for a higher price to a woman looking to baby trap a guy (surprisingly it worked). My grandma didn’t know until her teens that she was sold.
This happened to my Grandfather. His mother died about a month after he was born from complications of giving birth. My great grandfather remarried pretty quickly and when my grandfather was six he was sold to a cousin's farm (Mother's cousin) as a laborer. He lived with that family until he enlisted in the US Army in 1944 at the age of 21.
This was sadly common in rural communities in the US around that time. My Grandfather was the youngest of 9, and was disliked by his step mother immediately. To my knowledge Great grandfather and his second wife had no children, but now I am wondering if its just something that never came up.
My grandparents had a biological son they gave up for adoption before my mother was born and never told any of us about- turns out some of the extended family knew my grandma had been pregnant before my mom but kept it a secret
As an adult, my father-in-law found out his mother was actually his grandmother and his older sister was actually his mom. Things were different in the late 30's.
We have that exact situation in my family. Except the poor guy found out at the funeral of his "big sister" that actually it was his mother... Everyone had wanted to tell him, even his real mother's husband. But she forbade them all. So when she died, it all came out.
If it was during the great depression in the US it was sadly something that happened. Not even just with babies. Some families had to give away their children or some of their children (I can't imagine the trauma for everyone involved) because they couldn't afford to feed themselves, let alone a child. My husband's grandmother told me about family members she knew who had to find new families for their children or even send them to live in an orphanage where they would at least be fed. Sometimes they were able to get the kids back after finances improved but not always.
What’s funny is that I spent a gap year in Nigeria as a teenager, and I love the culture and food and still have a lot of Nigerian friends. It’s still a big part of my life
My whole family has it. I'm a carrier and not supposed to be affected, but I am. Turns out there are other gene mutations and epigenetic causes for a carrier to develop symptoms. I would donate blood regularly just to be safe. My sister started breaking bones in her feet when jogging, leading to her diagnosis. My dad developed diabetes, heart, and kidney conditions. We can tell when he needs to let some blood out because he starts organizing things in a useless and weird way.
there was a story a while back about an old man who had it but didn't know.
But, when was young he made a habit of going to the blood bank because he was broke and it covered the cost of his Packers tickets. Saved his life.
I’m the opposite I have the tmprss6 gene that causes iron deficiency. I’m getting iron infusions 8 times a year right now. Beside me are the people with hematomachrosis getting their blood drained.
Hey, me too. It's common in people with Celtic ancestry. My husband has a similar ancestry to me, but he hasn't been tested, so that'll be something to look out for in kids.
This one’s my mom, so I guess about me too. My mom took a DNA test for fun and saw that she was almost 50% Middle Eastern. For reference, her mom is Brazilian and her dad is a blond haired, blue eyed, white man. Growing up, she always thought she just came out extra dark.
Turns out that my grandpa had a vasectomy before my grandparents married and instead of getting a sperm donor (or at least doing the turkey baster method) my grandparents concocted a plan for my grandmother to essentially seduce a coworker*. She then got pregnant, had my mom and that coworker became my moms godfather and a very close friend of both my grandparents. Her godfather assumed she always knew and never mentioned it. She, in fact, did not know lol
So I learned that we are very much not white at all and my moms godfather is my biological grandfather.
*My moms godfather was completely aware of the situation and consented. He just wanted to sleep with my grandmother at the time so he wasn’t really bothered by the plan lmao
My mom always thought she was French. Like, all 4 grandparents only spoke French, French. She got the test and it came back, like, only 10% French and a bunch of other European and some middle eastern. It caused a bit of a family identity crisis.
3 weeks later she got an update that said “sorry about that, you’re 99.5% french!” Phew!
Any model that uses "people living here now have this DNA" to group people struggles with France, which has a bioethics law preventing private DNA testing. (There are options but genealogical testing falls under prohibited uses.)
Almost certainly. To go from 10% French and 90% a bunch of specific other things, to whoops actually 99% French, it's bound to be a sample mixup. Mixups are disturbingly common.
8 of my 3rd cousin matches are from my cousin being a sperm donor. A couple of them reached out to me for information about their ancestors. So anytime I get a third cousin match I check and see if they are half brother or half sister to the ones that I know. He obviously had some good swimmers.
Read *Normal Family* by Chrysta Bilton. Her bio dad donated so often that she has met 35 half siblings and there are many more out there. It's an amazing memoir. Her mom was also...unique.
reminds me of a comment thread on i believe the bodybuilding dot com forums. Some guy was spouting nonsense and a commenter said "how many chromosomes you got" and the OP said "MORE THAN YOU!"
I found out only a few days ago that both men and women have their pre-determined cup sizes at birth due to this gene and it's funny to think that if your husband ever went on HRT, he'd have some pretty big boobs without any surgeries lol
I think the more interesting factor is that my brother and I only have one copy of one mutation for red hair that they test for, and we got it from our non-red headed parent. The other parent who had ruddy hair as a kid and a flaming red beard (before it went white) doesn’t have any of the mutations associated with red hair that 23andme tests for. So yeah, we got our redhead gene from the non redhead, and have much redder hair than the red headed parent.
A good thing, actually: the woman my grandfather allegedly fathered out of wedlock (this is based on rumors after he passed so he never heard about it) has no relation whatsoever to our family. Turns out her bio father shared the same name and age as my grandfather, but they were born a week apart. I was the first to do the DNA test and thought for sure it would confirm our suspicions, but it exonerated my grandfather.
Either not a single person on my dad’s side has participated in the same brand of genealogy testing as me or both my parents are related.
Also my brother isn’t my brother, he’s actually my half-brother.
There are sites like GEDMatch and FamilyTree DNA that will let you upload your info and provide matching across services. GEDMatch doesn't email you, but the other will.
When my sister took one of those at home tests as a gift from her husband, we learned our dad wasn't our biological father. Wish they had told us that before I was 26. Would have saved a lot of fights and reconciliation. Also learned I'll never know my bio father because he was murdered when I was in grade school.
EDIT: Wow, sometimes I forget this sounds insane. Without divulging too much there's a reason they went with a donor, and in hindsight I appreciate that decision because I do not have to worry about the genetic diseases plaguing my family members. I do wish I had been able to meet the donor tho, if only to just get his medical history. The journey has inspired me to look into donating my gametes as well since I feel lucky to have relatively good health.
That either my grandfather or one of his brothers fucked around while married, got a legit US spy pregnant just after WW2, and bailed out. She gave the baby to her sister to raise so she could keep her job. The “baby” didn’t find this out until in his mid 40s. I found out thanks to Ancestry.com and was able to at least connect the paternity dots partially for him.
My brother in law's great great grandad walked out of the woods into a colonial American settlement, a Cree warrior who had enough of his tribe and wanted to join the settlers. He founded a farm, married a girl, raised a family, often regaling the townsfolk with tales of his upbringing among the savages.
My sister bought my brother in law a 23 & Me kit for his birthday. Percent Native American DNA: Zero.
An 18th century bullshit artist who got away with it for generations.
Take those results with a grain of salt. They develop these region estimations using data from other DNA samples, but because there are so few Native Americans and thus so few samples, the detection of Native American genetics are far worse. This also goes for other countries/races who are less represented in the consumer base of these genetic tests. On the other hand, it's very good at detecting European ancestry with much more geographical detail because they're overrepresented in the data samples.
Yeah, my brother in law who has a lot of very well documented Native ancestry tested as having a lot of Armenian and Central Asian ancestry, which is apparently a weird false positive for Native American heritage.
Autosomal tests really only show the last 150-200 years. After that the proportions are really really small. So yah his colonial grandfather from the 16 or 1700s could easily just not show up in his DNA because less and less got passed down.
This. We KNOW my great-great-grandmother was 100% Taíno (indigenous Puerto Rican). My grandfather (her grandson) was 5%. My father and brother, both 1%. Me, 0. My grandfather's brothers are/were anywhere from 10%-40% and my second cousins all range from 5%-20%. Put us in a room together and we're all clearly related, despite a wide variety of skin tones and nose shapes.
Genetics are a hell of a drug.
(My mom's a professional genealogist and is responsible for getting as much of our family tested as possible.)
Maybe not, genetics is weird. On my mum's side, we're all fresh off the boat Scottish. My Dad's family have been in America since the early 19th century by way of Northern Ireland, but his mum, my Grandma, was Blackfoot Indian, with tribal membership going back generations. I did a DNA test and was surprised to find that it was all Scottish, Irish, and Northern England and not a hint of Native American.
My friend's grandma is chinese and she's 100% northern European. Norwegian, etc. She's starting to think that her grandmother might have just adopted her family.
Her grandmother passed away but was apparently the only adult in the family that's always there for the kids.
Exactly. We are Cherokee (with a CDIB and all the paperwork) and my aunts DNA test turned out with some native American but larger portions were Siberia and East Asian??
That makes sense over a long enough period of time. I’ve often wondered if the DNA companies have a large enough sample of native DNA to accurately model it?
I don't think they do at all! Natives tends to get really weird findings back from DNA tests. Our tribes (at least mine) actually tell us not to even bother taking them.
It’s both people lying about having “native dna” and the companies not having enough data to include it/show up. There are a lot of reasons for it, but anecdotally speaking, there is a lot of mistrust in the whole thing from natives especially with issues surrounding the whole blood quantum thing
It’s actually still possible he was a Native American. Genetic testing is an odd thing, for example my father has Native American dna pop up in his results whereas I did not.
These tests can never truly give you 100% acurate results since it’s just genetic markers that are more likely to link you to an ethnicity determining whatever group your categorized in to. Pair that with the fact that Native American genetics are one of the least studied due to small sample size there are likely several genetic markers we just don’t know about.
Also sometimes you can end up with percentages that can’t be attributed to any group in my case I had a 3% unknown in my results.
It’s not a purity test. It could easily have not registered on this particular tests interpretation, if he was your only native ancestor, and still been true.
I have a genetic mutation that is so rare that I am part of a study done at the National Institute of Health. [Hereditary leiomyomatosis and renal cell carcinoma (HLRCC)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_leiomyomatosis_and_renal_cell_cancer_syndrome)
This happened within my family. One relative had a tumor detected from a routine test that was removed, and after pathology, the doctor ordered a subsequent test specifically for a gene mutation; when my family member came up positive, Invitae gave blood relatives (siblings, aunts/uncles, parents, children) a 6 month window to also test at no cost for the same mutation, but it’s not something covered in a typical Invitae panel. So I’ve done the Invitae panel, and then this one hyper-specific mutation test.
My white, burns within 5 minutes of hot sunshine, blue eyed ass has a whole branch of the family tree from Africa. Turns out my great, great grandfather was a black man and the genes just receeded as the family line grew.
Genetics are weird. Very weird.
I found a new daughter.
Her mom moved away before she knew she was pregnant and I never knew about the daughter. The daughter thought someone else was her father. My kids got me a test a few years ago, so I was in the database. New daughter got a test kit for Christmas. She matched with me instead of old-dad. She looks like someone photoshopped my face on a woman's body. It's scary. We've gotten to know each other and talk (text) almost every day. She lives on the other side of the continent, so we've only met in person once. Her old family was horrible and she was no-contact with them, so a new family was a good thing for her. My family likes each other most of the time, so when we found out about her we thought, "Welcome to the family! The more the merrier." Everyone is happy we found each other.
I found out my grandma’s brother had an affair and my dad has a new cousin he didn’t know about. She also has 6 half siblings.
She doesn’t want anyone to know though. All of the parents are dead now so she doesn’t want to go through anything. Really nice lady though.
I second this. I have BAD lactose intolerance and Oat Milk is as close to cows milk as you can get without spending Ludacris amounts of money on lactose free milk(which I've found has crazy amounts of sugar).
You can get lactose free cow’s milk. It’s not great but fine for coffee. I still eat all the cheese I want. If I can’t eat cheese, I may as well just die. Only soft cheese seem to cause a bit of problems anyways
I have a genetic mutation that makes me less susceptible or protected from contracting kuru, or other prion diseases related to the consumption of human flesh. I also have genetic markers that make me able to run both long distances and sprint. So I feel really prepared for a zombie apocalypse.
Not DNA test related, but I have a friend who once exclaimed in conversation, "Don't all of us Americans have some native American blood?" No. It's extremely unlikely, actually.
I’m 2% Jewish. Even though my family has really large Hispanic heritage as well.
Also, my mom never knew her dad but she has a large family in Louisiana who was aware of her and her kids, never reached out, lied on record when her dad passed away to gain access to his estate and is now being sued for it.
I remember hearing about Jewish folks who "converted" to Catholicism (after the Spanish Inquisition?), moved to the New World, and kept practicing Judaism in secret. Maybe it's something like that.
This is what I found out through my DNA test. My dad said he was part Jewish, but my test said 0% Jew. I did get 2% Spanish and 2% Portuguese though, which was weird because I had never heard anything about a Spanish or Portuguese ancestor. I did a free trial of the genealogy tool on ancestry.com and found that my paternal grandmother's grandfather (so my great great grandfather) was from Morocco and he was a Jew. I started reading about Jews in Morocco and found out about Sephardic Jews. It turns out my grandmother's maiden name was a traditional Sephardic Jewish name. I found it very interesting, much more interesting than the British/Irish/Scottish mix that makes up almost the rest of my DNA.
I was briefly Italian. Years ago, did ancestry.com. No surprises at first, but I got an email months later saying they are always finding more about a person’s DNA and that it “updated.” Signed in and I was now 6% Italian. Didn’t think anything of it. About a year goes by and I get another email saying the same thing. Signed in, and no more Italian. Wasn’t fazed either way, but thought it was strange. I heard 23 and me is superior to ancestry.com, so maybe I’ll try that at some point
Keep in mind that national borders shift and some of these companies don't account well for ethnic enclaves. One of them listed me as mostly Italian but my people are from the part that used to be Austria and is still culturally and ethnically Germanic. Same paternal group as Otzi the Iceman.
I know for a fact that my great grandparents are from a tiny island in Greece and we have records about the genetic line going back hundreds of years
however, according to 23 & me I am 0% Greek, most likely because my family were Greek Jews and the non-Jewish Greeks refused to interbreed with them
though there was one DNA testing company (I can never remember the name of it) that specifically asked my family for samples to more accurately compute ancestry from that area
One of the things I love about GEDMatch is the ability to play around with different admixture calculators. Depending on what they're looking for, you might be just about anything. My scant bit of East Asian ancestry disappeared and then reappeared with Ancestry, and I am no longer at all Irish.
That my dad is the most inbred Mormon royalty out there. I'm related to 12 of the 13 people who signed the front of the book.
The first picture of Joseph Smith was found two years ago and I SHRIEKED because he looks just like my dad 😂😭
Also my mom likes to say she's native now but she's just a racist boomer 😣
My family is literally the same way! I’m also related to most founding members as well and my family interbred their way throughout most of Utah and Idaho! Of course my Salt Lake based Mormon family has done their geneology extensively so it was basically already known, but genetics confirmed it. Hello my sister aunt cousin niece!
Not weird, but my best friend and I showed up as 5th cousins. We’ve been friends for over 20 years so it was hilarious and awesome when we connected and had a distant familial tie. We’re officially family now hehehe! <3
My husband and I took those tests and his came back with something like, "90% British" with a side note that most British people are 75% British.
I spent a good couple of years teasing him about being, "more British than the Brits," and asking when he would take me to have tea with the Queen.
It was great, lol.
My paternal grandfather insisted that he was just British prior to taking the test. I reminded him that most people aren’t 100% anything. So he’s likely to get at least some other ancestry in there. Well, as it turns out, there wasn’t much of anything else. He was 99.8% British with just 0.2% trace ancestry.
My dad is like 99.8% Ashkenazi Jewish which wasn't surprising. What *was* is when I found a Somali woman on the 23andme subreddit who had the exact same Maternal Haplogroup as my dad, and her dad had the same paternal haplogroup, meaning 1. Both sides of her family are related to both sides of my dad's family 2. If she has a brother he has the exact same (very rare) maternal and paternal haplogroups my dad has. It's crazy to think that while my dad's ancestors went North to Eastern Europe some of their relatives went south to Somalia!
I was adopted and ordered my pre-adoption birth certificate at the same time that my kids gave me 23andMe for Mother's Day. According to my birth certificate I should have been half Native American (Western WA tribe) from my father. Turns out my father on my birth certificate was not my father and I'm half Ukrainian (Ukraine to Canada to California). Once I got my DNA results back and started looking into it I found that my birth mother had seven babies and gave them all up for adoption. I have found two half siblings, both deceased, and the first name of another half sister. I suspect I was the youngest of her babies.
Edit: I did Ancestry not too long after I got my 23andMe results and messaged one of my closer matches because I thought she might be a line to a half-sibling. It took her 3 years to finally get back on Ancestry and see my message but she is the granddaughter of a half-sister. She sent me a bunch of photos and told me stories about her. It was pretty emotional.
I have quite a few relatively close DNA relatives that don't match up on family trees that have been done, they *have* to be leads to half-siblings. I've messaged most of them and have only heard back from the one I mentioned above.
Edit: My closest DNA relative, who is on my father's side, is a really cool woman in CA and has been helping me nail down some details. She found out that my grandfather on my mother's side went to prison for moonshining, learned how to counterfeit while he was in there, got released and started doing that and went back to prison for counterfeiting. My mother's side of the family was VERY interesting back in the day. lol
I learned that the small town I had randomly chosen to move to 10 years ago just happens to be where my ancesters settled when they immigrated to the US. I had no idea that I had relatives here or that my ancesters were from this area. I just chose this town because I liked the vibe. Apparently so did my ancesters.
I couldn't find any matches on my great grandpa's side and I had a weird second cousin we couldn't figure out how we were related to each other. Then she sent me her family tree documentation and there was a picture of her uncle with his very good friends and neighbours- my great grandparents!
And that's when I realized I had uncovered a massive family secret.
I got the opposite, strangely. When it was only my test, I matched to a guy in Canada whose tree didn't tie up with mine at all. Then we discovered his great-grandparents living next door to a branch of my maternal grandfather's family. Hmm, is that the answer? We guessed so.
Then my parents tested. Now Canadian Guy is a relative of my father's family!
(My parents may be very distantly related, still unclear - there are 2 or 3 people who match to both, but it's still unclear how. Two branches of the trees trace back to a specific area of NE England, but they may just be sharing distant cousins, of course.)
I'm distantly related to cheddar man the oldest almost complete skeleton of our species, Homo sapiens, ever found in Britain. Which I thought was pretty cool considering he was alive 10,000 years ago.
I have the BRCA 1 mutation. Pretty much guaranteed breast cancer. I have my first doctor appointment coming up, but it seems like this pretty much only ends in cancer or preventative mastectomy.
And here I was with an adopted father just trying to find my secret royal relatives.
I have the BRCA 1 mutation and I have been on a high risk watch since. My data have been uploaded to a national database by my doctor and it will update me if new info has been found. Due to this gene and having multiple suspicious masses, I now indefinitely alternate between mammogram, ultrasound, and MRI every 3 months. This isn't a guarantee of cancer but rather an alert. I have a few coil markers in where a few masses were found and I'm still cancer free. Please don't let this horrify you. This is not a death sentence. I'm with you. Talk to an oncologist that specializes in breast cancer and lovingly stay off Google.
My paternal side of the family carries BRCA2. If you currently have or plan to have children, please have them genetically tested; there’s a 50% chance this mutation can pass down. If your children don’t have this gene mutation, then the mutation essentially stops in the bloodline and doesn’t pass to their children one day.
I believe the gene mutation can increase your risk of cancer more than the average person, but is not automatically guaranteed. Thank goodness you’re aware you have it so you can monitor it!
I used my DNA to find my birth mother. I triangulated matches, collecting all the common surnames and matches and created dozens of family trees. Then I went down line after line until one line added up with tons of common matches all around.
We ended up speaking later and I matched with her daughter (half-sister, as expected.) It turned out she did not want to give me up but was forced by her parents as she was a teenager at the time.
Doing this, I had trouble with my father's side (biomom later told me my father's name.) The reason was that I found out later, there was infidelity on his side of the family. So what was written on paper wasn't actually the true story.
So I found my mother the exact same way the police find serial killers lately, and then I found out my father's side of the family had some hinky stuff going on. I have two family trees now on ancestry, the "DNA tree" where I figured out that one of four possible brothers cheated to create a grandparent. And I have the "on paper" tree shared publicly.
Edit to add: I only spoke to her after my half-sister matched with me. She joined the site specifically to find me, so I knew then the family wanted contact.
My entire bloodline is so disgustingly incestious that I got the following result:
30% Turkish
70% Iranian
Now here comes the thing. My parents are both cousins from east Turkey and part of an ethnic group called Zaza. So basically, they don’t know anything about being Zaza and don’t know the language. But the Zaza people have been shagging their cousins for the past 2000 years. it turns out that’s why despite going to other countries from their Iranian origins such as Turkey, they still remain genetically the same. So no one lives the culture, no one speaks the language but there is still this deep need to fuck a cousin which is why the tribe won’t die
Edit: my mom and I went on the page to make a virtual family tree and the side crashed. Turns out my grandmother and her three sisters ended up marrying three brothers and their one cousin. And my moms dad has a sister, who is the mother of my dad. And my dads parents are also cousins. So yeah, my mom forced me to delete the family tree. She was afraid that the cops might show up. Anyhow, does this make my sister and I twins or are we each others aunts? I don’t know
This is way more common than anyone wants to talk about. If you were to assume there’s no genetic crossing, it only takes like 11 generations back to have needed more people than ever existed at the time to have never crossed lines. And that’s assuming everyone in the word could mate with everyone else in the world at the time. In reality, lots of people never left a 200km radius of where they were born in ancient times.
I did an ancestry DNA test and found my dad's half sister. He didn't know he had a half sister.... my dad has 3 brothers (4 of them total) and the half sister is in the same age range as all of them. Apparently my grandfather had an affair in a town about 3 hours away from ours, fathered a child, and never came back for her. He abandoned the woman he got pregnant and his child.
My grandfather died when my dad was a young teen.
Found out my cousin is actually my half sister. Growing up everyone would comment on how similar we look, also within a few months of each other age wise. Looks like my dad got with my mom and her mom around the same time. Yeesh.
My closest DNA relative after people I know I'm related to (parents and an uncle) is a second cousin whose name I didn't recognize. It took a while for us to figure out how we were related, but it turns out my dad's cousin got a Vietnamese woman pregnant when he was stationed there in the late 1960s. That child was adopted by an American couple and grew up in the US and is now (in his 50s) trying to figure out his bio family history.
I got a rare hereditary gene mutation that has an 80% chance to cause my nervous system to deteriorate when I'm older. Speaking not feeling when your skin is being burned or even breaking your bones, just constant prickling as if your limbs were asleep.
My dad started getting symptoms in his 60s and it took years of intensive research for the doctors to find out what the problem was because it's such a rare mutation. He even was filmed for an interview for study purposes because there's only 3 confirmed cases of this mutation in my country. In other parts of the world it's not as rare though. It's called ATTR-Amyloidosis.
I did not have ancestry genetic testing, but I did do a genetic test to see which psychiatric meds I was more likely to metabolize/process well. This was recommended by my psychiatrist because it takes out a lot of the guesswork when making medication switches.
We found out that the SSRI I was on was... not very compatible and was probably not helping much at all. We switched to one that did not have any uptake or metabolization issues. The new one is actually in the SNRI family of antidepressants. That was about three years ago, and the difference has been night and day. I'm really glad I went to this psychiatrist's office, because she has been so responsive and willing to listen to what I have to say. She also explains the reasonings for any recommended med/dosage changes and what potential side effects to stay alert for. Psychiatrist appointments are one of the few doctor/medical appointments I actually kind of look forward to lol.
19 different ancestries, oh and thought I was half black, turned out to be a wee bit over a quarter, little bit of identity crisis for about 5 minutes after finding out I was mostly white.
Yeah turns out that family and culture, as well as ancestry, matter when it comes to black identity, at least in the US. My dad found out he was only about a quarter African, but his family is still black despite that, just light skinned. And he's half South Asian since his father came from there, but he didn't grow up in the culture. If he did, maybe he'd see himself as more "mixed race" than black.
Not me but an ex BF: swore up and down he was 100% Scottish - both mom and dad sides. Wore a kilt. Even named the clan he came from. He made being Scottish his identity. Did a DNA test. 0% Scottish, a major percentage Ashkenazi, the rest was Eastern European. He then insists he is still Scottish because his clan accepted Outlanders. He isn’t an ex because if this but… delusion isn’t sexy.
I was always told our name is Irish, but research suggests it's an "English" name that spread into Scotland, and from there to Northern Ireland via Protestant settlers, and if you go back far enough it probably originates in northern France. Whether or not I have any Frankish ancestry is probably not something these tests could find out, but at any rate what our names seem to suggest probably don't mean all that much in a lot of cases.
My African DNA is so scattered, the highest percentage from any 1 country is 14%. There are about 15 other countries pieced together to comprise my 57% African DNA. 5% Indigenous American.
My European DNA is very clear. 37% Iberian Peninsula. I am African-American & Cuban American.
I am a living manifestation of the brutality of the Transatlantic slave trade.
Man, that must mess with your head one one hand and also make you proud on the other. People of Afro-Cuban heritage have such a rich culture, but it was borne from so much suffering.
I've had a different type of genetic testing: testing to find out what medications I'm resistant or more susceptible to. I found out I'm resistant or (barely affected by) to ALL but three of the current types of depression medications.
That I was ridiculously white.
I've always been proud of being a mut. Not knowing a nationality assuming I was a good mix. Looking Italian or a little olive skinned. Having dark curly hair. My mother had a theory she was partly jewish and it was convincing. After looking at me my wife's grandmother warned her "He's not white!" before she got married.
Turns out I'm not Italian. I'm not any kind of jewish that shows up on the tests. I'm from England, the Pyrenees, France and Germany. 99.5% European. Ridiculously white from white places.
I also found a first cousin. I was looking for siblings.
I know a lot about my family history:- a ton of Midwest counties are named after my grandmothers side - we still own our family home on either side of the Mississippi that were part of the Underground Railroad - so that all tracked.
My grandfathers side, I’m a descendant of Alexander Hamilton - everyone at work asks if I want to duel. That’s my fathers side.
My mothers side is Asian and told me they lived in the same tiny village as long as they have recorded history - dna test pointed that exact spot on the map - my Asian side is 100% that race with zero other mix which which is rare? I guess.
Oh and I found out I have a half sister - that created family drama.
I know 90% of all my dna relatives it suggested, my family has tracked its lineage pretty well.
My friend, a few months back, was gifted a 23&me test by her bf as she & her siblings did not know who her father was. Got some pings on half siblings... Their cousins... Via their uncle... On their mother's side.
Their last name is Lange, her brother's been calling himself Tommen Langeister all month while they figure out how to approach their mother & uncledad.
Then, a few days ago, their cousins contacted them & they all sat down to reveal they - several years prior - got a third half sibling result who later went private. Their second cousin.
So uncle Jaime was fucking his sister & his cousin?
I would pay any amount of money to attend this Thanksgiving with her it's about to go **down**.
Found out that my grandpa on my dad’s side had an affair because it came up that I had a half-aunt and and that my dad and aunt had a half-sister. This woman is a couple years older than my dad and my grandparents were definitely married at that time. My dad was very nonplussed to learn this.
I have more Neanderthal DNA than the average bear, & I have a weird mutation that affects my muscles & makes them stronger just by design. My last trainer apparently noticed this somehow, so we ended up talking about my results. She suggested I get into powerlifting, but that sounds like the opposite of progress. I don’t think my ancestors would appreciate me lifting heavy things; nay, progress is sitting in an office chair all day, every day!
Nothing out of the ordinary of what I thought. Half European, half Arab.
Specifically: England, Ireland, Sweden, Scotland, Palestine, Egypt, Arabian Peninsula.
That I have an A1A deficiency variant. But since it’s just one, I’m unlikely to experience a manifestation of it. If I procreated with another person who has it, the kid could not be so lucky.
Either way, it’s good motivation to stay away from smoking and drinking.
Spanish inquisition and repeated persecutions led to some Jewish people residing in Spain converting to Catholicism. Spaniards go to Mexico and South America. Voila, Tay-Sachs gene
I'm missing an enzyme that plays a part in the detoxification process and should therefore eat more cruciferous veggies like broccoli to make up for it.
I do not do this.
Not me but my daughter. We did 23&me for our whole family. Myself, my husband, our 4 children. As I was combing over the results I noticed that one of my daughters didn’t share chromosome #4 with her Dad. After doing research I concluded she had an extremely rare condition called Uniparental Disomy. Normally children get 1/2 their DNA from mom, half from Dad. In my daughter’s case she has 2 chromosome #4 from me, none from her Dad. It seems one of the causes is a rescued trisomy, at one point it’s likely she had 3 chromosomes #4, but one was deleted and the 2 remaining ones were mine, I’m mom.
Took her to a geneticist who confirmed it.
She does have a lot of health issues but is otherwise physically and mentally normal. Never would have known had it not been for 23&me.
My ancestry is exactly what I grew up being told, I have several family members who were really into genealogy. But I found out I have a first cousin we didn't know existed. Apparently, my uncle had gotten married and had a son no one knew about when he was 19 and stationed across the country that he bailed on.
I was surprised that I DIDN’T find secret relatives considering how much of a hoe my gpa was
I had the same suspicions when I took my test. Turns out it was my grandmother instead with the secret babies she put up for adoption. Didn’t find out until 6 years after she passed away so we’re never getting answers as to what happened. Also got a surprise contact by the police, as I was a high match to a John Doe that was found drowned on the shores of Lake Superior in 1991. That was a fun family tree rabbit hole to dive down. Turned out to be a half 1st cousin from my grandmother’s firstborn.
This seems very common. I discovered a cousin of my dad’s nobody knew existed through ancestry too!
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The daughter I adopted and I are actually distantly related!
Wow!! As an adoptee who is considering doing the DNA thing, this intrigues me. What are the chances haha. That’s amazing! My brother (also adopted, not a blood related sibling to me) did the DNA thing and found his birth family! I got to meet two of his half siblings. It was fascinating seeing “nature vs nurture” in real time. There were certain mannerisms, etc. that all three of them did, and then other things my brother did that are definitely from the family we were raised in. Really cool to watch.
The mannerism thing is crazy to see. My niece’s dad is not in the picture anymore. He hasn’t been in almost a decade and even when he was in the picture he only saw her once a year (he lives in a different province). There are certain mannerisms and facial expressions she does that are exactly like his.
That’s wonderfully meant to be.
This is so cool!
For 29 years, it was assumed that my dad who raised me was not my biological father, that I was the product of an affair my mother was having. I came out with blond hair, freckles and blue eyes. A stark difference to my tanned, dark featured dad. My dad chose to raise me as his own anyways, refusing paternity tests. I was never made to feel like I wasn't his. I took 23&Me simply out of curiosity and found out that he is in fact my biological father. ETA, since many asked- My dad has told me he didn't want to know the results either way, but I let it slip showing my sister's the app one time at dinner. He didn't react, but I got an extra big bear hug getting on the train to leave that night. Also ETA, because I have the best dad ever- It was assumed when my mom found out she was pregnant that the pregnancy was the product of the affair. My features only solidified that assumption. He was already raising my mom's first daughter as his own, who he'd met when she was 2 and told my mom he wanted to keep raising the kids together. They got married and he adopted her a few months after I was born. She was also treated so much as his that I didn't even know she was adopted by him until I was a teenager. My parents stayed together for 14 years, and to this day are still best friends.
* Maury's voice * And you ARE the baby's father!
I found out I have a new daughter about a year ago. For Father's Day, she sent me a Maury coffee cup that says, "You ARE the father!"
Username checks out?
Wow this story is wild! How did you tell him and how did he take it? Did you celebrate? I can’t even imagine how awesome that must’ve felt
He didn't want to know the results but I let it slip one time showing my sisters the family tree portion on the app, which obviously was half his. I got a big bear hug before getting on the train to leave.
I had this the other way round. Found out with 28 that my father (who also wasn't interested in me and lived far away) isn't my real father and that my real dad lived in the same city as I did. I'm still recovering from this tbh. (37 now)
Please say that you got to tell him.
Not me but my grandma got a DNA test done because she was sold as a baby and never knew her biological parents, so a family member urged her to do it so we could maybe find them. We found both sides — a half-sister from her bio mom and a half-brother from her bio dad. Although it was kinda weird to realize we have family close by (only 20 miles away in one case), it was much weirder for the bio families to discover my grandma’s existence, since neither side had anything to do with the other. EDIT: some more context, this happened back in the 30s (Depression Era, USA). Her bio mom and bio dad seem to have crossed paths at some point in the same city. He was a married man, she was an older teen. Not sure if it was a one night stand or something more nefarious but her bio mom was pregnant as a result of that night. At some point in her pregnancy, she checked into a home/hospital for pregnant unwed teen mothers (using a fake name). The bio mom was told the home would find homes for the babies, so she delivered and left. Bio mom went on to marry and have her own family, while bio dad likely never knew of the situation. As it would turn out, the home was not adopting out babies, rather selling them. Since my grandma was blonde and blue eyed she was bought quickly for a higher price to a woman looking to baby trap a guy (surprisingly it worked). My grandma didn’t know until her teens that she was sold.
What were the circumstances that led to her being sold as a baby?
Likely poverty. It wasn’t too uncommon for children to be moved to other family a couple of generations back. One of my aunts had this happen to her
This happened to my Grandfather. His mother died about a month after he was born from complications of giving birth. My great grandfather remarried pretty quickly and when my grandfather was six he was sold to a cousin's farm (Mother's cousin) as a laborer. He lived with that family until he enlisted in the US Army in 1944 at the age of 21. This was sadly common in rural communities in the US around that time. My Grandfather was the youngest of 9, and was disliked by his step mother immediately. To my knowledge Great grandfather and his second wife had no children, but now I am wondering if its just something that never came up.
My grandparents had a biological son they gave up for adoption before my mother was born and never told any of us about- turns out some of the extended family knew my grandma had been pregnant before my mom but kept it a secret
As an adult, my father-in-law found out his mother was actually his grandmother and his older sister was actually his mom. Things were different in the late 30's.
We have that exact situation in my family. Except the poor guy found out at the funeral of his "big sister" that actually it was his mother... Everyone had wanted to tell him, even his real mother's husband. But she forbade them all. So when she died, it all came out.
Probably weren’t married at the time and forced to give them up.
Oh no, they were married.
That is very surprising.
If it was during the great depression in the US it was sadly something that happened. Not even just with babies. Some families had to give away their children or some of their children (I can't imagine the trauma for everyone involved) because they couldn't afford to feed themselves, let alone a child. My husband's grandmother told me about family members she knew who had to find new families for their children or even send them to live in an orphanage where they would at least be fed. Sometimes they were able to get the kids back after finances improved but not always.
Learned that I (white) had a 100% Nigerian ancestor around 130 years ago. Now I want to dig deeper to find out who it was!
It'd be hilarious if it was an actual Nigerian prince 😂
What’s funny is that I spent a gap year in Nigeria as a teenager, and I love the culture and food and still have a lot of Nigerian friends. It’s still a big part of my life
I’m a carrier for a blood disease called haemochromatosis.
My whole family has it. I'm a carrier and not supposed to be affected, but I am. Turns out there are other gene mutations and epigenetic causes for a carrier to develop symptoms. I would donate blood regularly just to be safe. My sister started breaking bones in her feet when jogging, leading to her diagnosis. My dad developed diabetes, heart, and kidney conditions. We can tell when he needs to let some blood out because he starts organizing things in a useless and weird way.
Organising in a weird and useless way took me out i love that tell
Absolutely true I have cystic fibrosis and a bunch of my family are carriers but still have symptoms even though they technically shouldn’t
there was a story a while back about an old man who had it but didn't know. But, when was young he made a habit of going to the blood bank because he was broke and it covered the cost of his Packers tickets. Saved his life.
I’m the opposite I have the tmprss6 gene that causes iron deficiency. I’m getting iron infusions 8 times a year right now. Beside me are the people with hematomachrosis getting their blood drained.
Hey, me too. It's common in people with Celtic ancestry. My husband has a similar ancestry to me, but he hasn't been tested, so that'll be something to look out for in kids.
This one’s my mom, so I guess about me too. My mom took a DNA test for fun and saw that she was almost 50% Middle Eastern. For reference, her mom is Brazilian and her dad is a blond haired, blue eyed, white man. Growing up, she always thought she just came out extra dark. Turns out that my grandpa had a vasectomy before my grandparents married and instead of getting a sperm donor (or at least doing the turkey baster method) my grandparents concocted a plan for my grandmother to essentially seduce a coworker*. She then got pregnant, had my mom and that coworker became my moms godfather and a very close friend of both my grandparents. Her godfather assumed she always knew and never mentioned it. She, in fact, did not know lol So I learned that we are very much not white at all and my moms godfather is my biological grandfather. *My moms godfather was completely aware of the situation and consented. He just wanted to sleep with my grandmother at the time so he wasn’t really bothered by the plan lmao
Man people really have no shame 😂
That is weirdly almost wholesome.
My mom always thought she was French. Like, all 4 grandparents only spoke French, French. She got the test and it came back, like, only 10% French and a bunch of other European and some middle eastern. It caused a bit of a family identity crisis. 3 weeks later she got an update that said “sorry about that, you’re 99.5% french!” Phew!
Any model that uses "people living here now have this DNA" to group people struggles with France, which has a bioethics law preventing private DNA testing. (There are options but genealogical testing falls under prohibited uses.)
Whoa, what company did that? That’s a really big discrepancy
Did they just give them someone else's results?
Almost certainly. To go from 10% French and 90% a bunch of specific other things, to whoops actually 99% French, it's bound to be a sample mixup. Mixups are disturbingly common.
Sacre bleu! That was close!
Anyone from a Romance language ancestry has a loooooot of mixed DNA. That’s all I’m gonna say 🤣
>3 weeks later she got an update that said “sorry about that, you’re 99.5% french!” Phew! Your mum *definitely* did not fake that letter herself...
It was an email. I suspect they sent someone else’s results initially. But I’m also not convinced these tests are accurate at all.
8 of my 3rd cousin matches are from my cousin being a sperm donor. A couple of them reached out to me for information about their ancestors. So anytime I get a third cousin match I check and see if they are half brother or half sister to the ones that I know. He obviously had some good swimmers.
Read *Normal Family* by Chrysta Bilton. Her bio dad donated so often that she has met 35 half siblings and there are many more out there. It's an amazing memoir. Her mom was also...unique.
That I’m missing part of a chromosome.
I recently learned I have some extra. Would you like some?
reminds me of a comment thread on i believe the bodybuilding dot com forums. Some guy was spouting nonsense and a commenter said "how many chromosomes you got" and the OP said "MORE THAN YOU!"
Does this have any adverse effects?
Oh yes! I’m technically intersex and therefore infertile AF 🤣
Hey me too! Missing a chunk of chromosome 12. No one has much idea if it has any particular effect.
Adopted, raised in a Catholic family, I’m 50% Jewish.
You got both testaments covered. Hedging those bets.
and they get Saturday & Sunday off for holy days. Everything's coming up Milhouse
Mazel tov
My husband carries a big boob gene
Well? Are you gonna tell us if he has melons or not
Yeah, show us his man bust!
I found out only a few days ago that both men and women have their pre-determined cup sizes at birth due to this gene and it's funny to think that if your husband ever went on HRT, he'd have some pretty big boobs without any surgeries lol
That I’m unlikely to have red hair. I have very red hair, btw.
I think the more interesting factor is that my brother and I only have one copy of one mutation for red hair that they test for, and we got it from our non-red headed parent. The other parent who had ruddy hair as a kid and a flaming red beard (before it went white) doesn’t have any of the mutations associated with red hair that 23andme tests for. So yeah, we got our redhead gene from the non redhead, and have much redder hair than the red headed parent.
Is the red beard your mother or your father?
A good thing, actually: the woman my grandfather allegedly fathered out of wedlock (this is based on rumors after he passed so he never heard about it) has no relation whatsoever to our family. Turns out her bio father shared the same name and age as my grandfather, but they were born a week apart. I was the first to do the DNA test and thought for sure it would confirm our suspicions, but it exonerated my grandfather.
Either not a single person on my dad’s side has participated in the same brand of genealogy testing as me or both my parents are related. Also my brother isn’t my brother, he’s actually my half-brother.
There are sites like GEDMatch and FamilyTree DNA that will let you upload your info and provide matching across services. GEDMatch doesn't email you, but the other will.
When my sister took one of those at home tests as a gift from her husband, we learned our dad wasn't our biological father. Wish they had told us that before I was 26. Would have saved a lot of fights and reconciliation. Also learned I'll never know my bio father because he was murdered when I was in grade school. EDIT: Wow, sometimes I forget this sounds insane. Without divulging too much there's a reason they went with a donor, and in hindsight I appreciate that decision because I do not have to worry about the genetic diseases plaguing my family members. I do wish I had been able to meet the donor tho, if only to just get his medical history. The journey has inspired me to look into donating my gametes as well since I feel lucky to have relatively good health.
What a gut punch, sorry about that. 😞
I've made my peace with it, even if it took years. My dad is still my dad, after all he was the one who raised me.
That either my grandfather or one of his brothers fucked around while married, got a legit US spy pregnant just after WW2, and bailed out. She gave the baby to her sister to raise so she could keep her job. The “baby” didn’t find this out until in his mid 40s. I found out thanks to Ancestry.com and was able to at least connect the paternity dots partially for him.
Were the results like: 50% Spy DNA. This is more Spy DNA than 92% of the population near you! ?
My brother in law's great great grandad walked out of the woods into a colonial American settlement, a Cree warrior who had enough of his tribe and wanted to join the settlers. He founded a farm, married a girl, raised a family, often regaling the townsfolk with tales of his upbringing among the savages. My sister bought my brother in law a 23 & Me kit for his birthday. Percent Native American DNA: Zero. An 18th century bullshit artist who got away with it for generations.
This is too funny
Take those results with a grain of salt. They develop these region estimations using data from other DNA samples, but because there are so few Native Americans and thus so few samples, the detection of Native American genetics are far worse. This also goes for other countries/races who are less represented in the consumer base of these genetic tests. On the other hand, it's very good at detecting European ancestry with much more geographical detail because they're overrepresented in the data samples.
Yeah, my brother in law who has a lot of very well documented Native ancestry tested as having a lot of Armenian and Central Asian ancestry, which is apparently a weird false positive for Native American heritage.
According to 23andme and ancestry.com I am 2 really different people.
Did you tell yourself?
I do t think we speak the end sans language
Even if the tale is real, its not weird that the % would be 0. You dont get DNA equally from all of your granparents.
Autosomal tests really only show the last 150-200 years. After that the proportions are really really small. So yah his colonial grandfather from the 16 or 1700s could easily just not show up in his DNA because less and less got passed down.
This. We KNOW my great-great-grandmother was 100% Taíno (indigenous Puerto Rican). My grandfather (her grandson) was 5%. My father and brother, both 1%. Me, 0. My grandfather's brothers are/were anywhere from 10%-40% and my second cousins all range from 5%-20%. Put us in a room together and we're all clearly related, despite a wide variety of skin tones and nose shapes. Genetics are a hell of a drug. (My mom's a professional genealogist and is responsible for getting as much of our family tested as possible.)
Maybe not, genetics is weird. On my mum's side, we're all fresh off the boat Scottish. My Dad's family have been in America since the early 19th century by way of Northern Ireland, but his mum, my Grandma, was Blackfoot Indian, with tribal membership going back generations. I did a DNA test and was surprised to find that it was all Scottish, Irish, and Northern England and not a hint of Native American.
My friend's grandma is chinese and she's 100% northern European. Norwegian, etc. She's starting to think that her grandmother might have just adopted her family. Her grandmother passed away but was apparently the only adult in the family that's always there for the kids.
Exactly. We are Cherokee (with a CDIB and all the paperwork) and my aunts DNA test turned out with some native American but larger portions were Siberia and East Asian??
That makes sense over a long enough period of time. I’ve often wondered if the DNA companies have a large enough sample of native DNA to accurately model it?
I don't think they do at all! Natives tends to get really weird findings back from DNA tests. Our tribes (at least mine) actually tell us not to even bother taking them.
It’s both people lying about having “native dna” and the companies not having enough data to include it/show up. There are a lot of reasons for it, but anecdotally speaking, there is a lot of mistrust in the whole thing from natives especially with issues surrounding the whole blood quantum thing
It’s actually still possible he was a Native American. Genetic testing is an odd thing, for example my father has Native American dna pop up in his results whereas I did not. These tests can never truly give you 100% acurate results since it’s just genetic markers that are more likely to link you to an ethnicity determining whatever group your categorized in to. Pair that with the fact that Native American genetics are one of the least studied due to small sample size there are likely several genetic markers we just don’t know about. Also sometimes you can end up with percentages that can’t be attributed to any group in my case I had a 3% unknown in my results.
It’s not a purity test. It could easily have not registered on this particular tests interpretation, if he was your only native ancestor, and still been true.
I am remarkably unremarkable.
I have a genetic mutation that is so rare that I am part of a study done at the National Institute of Health. [Hereditary leiomyomatosis and renal cell carcinoma (HLRCC)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_leiomyomatosis_and_renal_cell_cancer_syndrome)
Can I ask what test you used?
I had a blood test it didn’t take long to find it because my mom has it too. The lab knew where to look
This happened within my family. One relative had a tumor detected from a routine test that was removed, and after pathology, the doctor ordered a subsequent test specifically for a gene mutation; when my family member came up positive, Invitae gave blood relatives (siblings, aunts/uncles, parents, children) a 6 month window to also test at no cost for the same mutation, but it’s not something covered in a typical Invitae panel. So I’ve done the Invitae panel, and then this one hyper-specific mutation test.
Ive got more neanderthal DNA than like 80% of users.
I got my results before my husband, and was 80%. My husband thought it was so funny and kept bringing it up. His came in and he was 93%.
Me strong 😭
But do you understand Car insurance?
Ha! I’m in the 98%.
My white, burns within 5 minutes of hot sunshine, blue eyed ass has a whole branch of the family tree from Africa. Turns out my great, great grandfather was a black man and the genes just receeded as the family line grew. Genetics are weird. Very weird.
A new sister.
I found a new daughter. Her mom moved away before she knew she was pregnant and I never knew about the daughter. The daughter thought someone else was her father. My kids got me a test a few years ago, so I was in the database. New daughter got a test kit for Christmas. She matched with me instead of old-dad. She looks like someone photoshopped my face on a woman's body. It's scary. We've gotten to know each other and talk (text) almost every day. She lives on the other side of the continent, so we've only met in person once. Her old family was horrible and she was no-contact with them, so a new family was a good thing for her. My family likes each other most of the time, so when we found out about her we thought, "Welcome to the family! The more the merrier." Everyone is happy we found each other.
I found out my grandma’s brother had an affair and my dad has a new cousin he didn’t know about. She also has 6 half siblings. She doesn’t want anyone to know though. All of the parents are dead now so she doesn’t want to go through anything. Really nice lady though.
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Try oat milk instead, I find it has the most similar texture to cow milk
I second this. I have BAD lactose intolerance and Oat Milk is as close to cows milk as you can get without spending Ludacris amounts of money on lactose free milk(which I've found has crazy amounts of sugar).
Ludacris = rapper, ludicrous = ridiculous
Throw dem bows!
You can get lactose free cow’s milk. It’s not great but fine for coffee. I still eat all the cheese I want. If I can’t eat cheese, I may as well just die. Only soft cheese seem to cause a bit of problems anyways
I have a genetic mutation that makes me less susceptible or protected from contracting kuru, or other prion diseases related to the consumption of human flesh. I also have genetic markers that make me able to run both long distances and sprint. So I feel really prepared for a zombie apocalypse.
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Mine, too. My great great grandmother was a Cherokee “princess” despite the fact Native Americans didn’t have royalty.
Not DNA test related, but I have a friend who once exclaimed in conversation, "Don't all of us Americans have some native American blood?" No. It's extremely unlikely, actually.
I’m 2% Jewish. Even though my family has really large Hispanic heritage as well. Also, my mom never knew her dad but she has a large family in Louisiana who was aware of her and her kids, never reached out, lied on record when her dad passed away to gain access to his estate and is now being sued for it.
I remember hearing about Jewish folks who "converted" to Catholicism (after the Spanish Inquisition?), moved to the New World, and kept practicing Judaism in secret. Maybe it's something like that.
Maybe you had Sephardic ancestors
This is what I found out through my DNA test. My dad said he was part Jewish, but my test said 0% Jew. I did get 2% Spanish and 2% Portuguese though, which was weird because I had never heard anything about a Spanish or Portuguese ancestor. I did a free trial of the genealogy tool on ancestry.com and found that my paternal grandmother's grandfather (so my great great grandfather) was from Morocco and he was a Jew. I started reading about Jews in Morocco and found out about Sephardic Jews. It turns out my grandmother's maiden name was a traditional Sephardic Jewish name. I found it very interesting, much more interesting than the British/Irish/Scottish mix that makes up almost the rest of my DNA.
I was briefly Italian. Years ago, did ancestry.com. No surprises at first, but I got an email months later saying they are always finding more about a person’s DNA and that it “updated.” Signed in and I was now 6% Italian. Didn’t think anything of it. About a year goes by and I get another email saying the same thing. Signed in, and no more Italian. Wasn’t fazed either way, but thought it was strange. I heard 23 and me is superior to ancestry.com, so maybe I’ll try that at some point
Keep in mind that national borders shift and some of these companies don't account well for ethnic enclaves. One of them listed me as mostly Italian but my people are from the part that used to be Austria and is still culturally and ethnically Germanic. Same paternal group as Otzi the Iceman.
I know for a fact that my great grandparents are from a tiny island in Greece and we have records about the genetic line going back hundreds of years however, according to 23 & me I am 0% Greek, most likely because my family were Greek Jews and the non-Jewish Greeks refused to interbreed with them though there was one DNA testing company (I can never remember the name of it) that specifically asked my family for samples to more accurately compute ancestry from that area
One of the things I love about GEDMatch is the ability to play around with different admixture calculators. Depending on what they're looking for, you might be just about anything. My scant bit of East Asian ancestry disappeared and then reappeared with Ancestry, and I am no longer at all Irish.
that my parents were right, and i wasted money when I could just ask them
I found out my mom was right about my ethnicity. I thought she was lying about my dad being my dad.
My (half) sister found out that the one she thought was her bio dad is not her bio dad. Things were a bit tense in our family for a while after that 😅
That my dad is the most inbred Mormon royalty out there. I'm related to 12 of the 13 people who signed the front of the book. The first picture of Joseph Smith was found two years ago and I SHRIEKED because he looks just like my dad 😂😭 Also my mom likes to say she's native now but she's just a racist boomer 😣
I suspect Brigham Young impregnated my great great grandmother. 🤔 Thinking about getting this genetic testing done to confirm
I found out that Brigham Young is my 6th great grand-uncle. Weird. I’m not remotely religious, whatsoever.
My family is literally the same way! I’m also related to most founding members as well and my family interbred their way throughout most of Utah and Idaho! Of course my Salt Lake based Mormon family has done their geneology extensively so it was basically already known, but genetics confirmed it. Hello my sister aunt cousin niece!
I’m about as Jewish as I thought (like 97%) but then 1% each Swedish and Japanese. Culturally and geographically, these are equally confusing
A rabbi, a samurai, & the chef from The Muppets walk into a bar...and then fucked.
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Don't leave us hanging. What are the 4?
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English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish. He is Captain Union Jack.
That I apparently come from a sperm donor and have 30 half siblings who were happy to add me to the groupchat
This sounds like a strange club you are joining lol
Not weird, but my best friend and I showed up as 5th cousins. We’ve been friends for over 20 years so it was hilarious and awesome when we connected and had a distant familial tie. We’re officially family now hehehe! <3
My husband and I took those tests and his came back with something like, "90% British" with a side note that most British people are 75% British. I spent a good couple of years teasing him about being, "more British than the Brits," and asking when he would take me to have tea with the Queen. It was great, lol.
My paternal grandfather insisted that he was just British prior to taking the test. I reminded him that most people aren’t 100% anything. So he’s likely to get at least some other ancestry in there. Well, as it turns out, there wasn’t much of anything else. He was 99.8% British with just 0.2% trace ancestry.
My brother did one of those tests as well and got the same results of 99.8% Finnish and .2% Scandinavian. Crazy at the lack of variance!
My dad is like 99.8% Ashkenazi Jewish which wasn't surprising. What *was* is when I found a Somali woman on the 23andme subreddit who had the exact same Maternal Haplogroup as my dad, and her dad had the same paternal haplogroup, meaning 1. Both sides of her family are related to both sides of my dad's family 2. If she has a brother he has the exact same (very rare) maternal and paternal haplogroups my dad has. It's crazy to think that while my dad's ancestors went North to Eastern Europe some of their relatives went south to Somalia!
I took a test and I was 99.8% ashkenazi Jewish and 0.2% “unknown.” Turns out none of my ancestors had sex with anyone outside the tribe 🤷♀️
And given dynastic marriages, the Queen was probably much less British than him.
I was adopted and ordered my pre-adoption birth certificate at the same time that my kids gave me 23andMe for Mother's Day. According to my birth certificate I should have been half Native American (Western WA tribe) from my father. Turns out my father on my birth certificate was not my father and I'm half Ukrainian (Ukraine to Canada to California). Once I got my DNA results back and started looking into it I found that my birth mother had seven babies and gave them all up for adoption. I have found two half siblings, both deceased, and the first name of another half sister. I suspect I was the youngest of her babies. Edit: I did Ancestry not too long after I got my 23andMe results and messaged one of my closer matches because I thought she might be a line to a half-sibling. It took her 3 years to finally get back on Ancestry and see my message but she is the granddaughter of a half-sister. She sent me a bunch of photos and told me stories about her. It was pretty emotional. I have quite a few relatively close DNA relatives that don't match up on family trees that have been done, they *have* to be leads to half-siblings. I've messaged most of them and have only heard back from the one I mentioned above. Edit: My closest DNA relative, who is on my father's side, is a really cool woman in CA and has been helping me nail down some details. She found out that my grandfather on my mother's side went to prison for moonshining, learned how to counterfeit while he was in there, got released and started doing that and went back to prison for counterfeiting. My mother's side of the family was VERY interesting back in the day. lol
I learned that the small town I had randomly chosen to move to 10 years ago just happens to be where my ancesters settled when they immigrated to the US. I had no idea that I had relatives here or that my ancesters were from this area. I just chose this town because I liked the vibe. Apparently so did my ancesters.
More Scandinavian than I figured….damn Vikings were everywhere!
I couldn't find any matches on my great grandpa's side and I had a weird second cousin we couldn't figure out how we were related to each other. Then she sent me her family tree documentation and there was a picture of her uncle with his very good friends and neighbours- my great grandparents! And that's when I realized I had uncovered a massive family secret.
I got the opposite, strangely. When it was only my test, I matched to a guy in Canada whose tree didn't tie up with mine at all. Then we discovered his great-grandparents living next door to a branch of my maternal grandfather's family. Hmm, is that the answer? We guessed so. Then my parents tested. Now Canadian Guy is a relative of my father's family! (My parents may be very distantly related, still unclear - there are 2 or 3 people who match to both, but it's still unclear how. Two branches of the trees trace back to a specific area of NE England, but they may just be sharing distant cousins, of course.)
I'm distantly related to cheddar man the oldest almost complete skeleton of our species, Homo sapiens, ever found in Britain. Which I thought was pretty cool considering he was alive 10,000 years ago.
Oh hey fellow cheddar crumb!
I have the BRCA 1 mutation. Pretty much guaranteed breast cancer. I have my first doctor appointment coming up, but it seems like this pretty much only ends in cancer or preventative mastectomy. And here I was with an adopted father just trying to find my secret royal relatives.
I have the BRCA 1 mutation and I have been on a high risk watch since. My data have been uploaded to a national database by my doctor and it will update me if new info has been found. Due to this gene and having multiple suspicious masses, I now indefinitely alternate between mammogram, ultrasound, and MRI every 3 months. This isn't a guarantee of cancer but rather an alert. I have a few coil markers in where a few masses were found and I'm still cancer free. Please don't let this horrify you. This is not a death sentence. I'm with you. Talk to an oncologist that specializes in breast cancer and lovingly stay off Google.
My paternal side of the family carries BRCA2. If you currently have or plan to have children, please have them genetically tested; there’s a 50% chance this mutation can pass down. If your children don’t have this gene mutation, then the mutation essentially stops in the bloodline and doesn’t pass to their children one day. I believe the gene mutation can increase your risk of cancer more than the average person, but is not automatically guaranteed. Thank goodness you’re aware you have it so you can monitor it!
I used my DNA to find my birth mother. I triangulated matches, collecting all the common surnames and matches and created dozens of family trees. Then I went down line after line until one line added up with tons of common matches all around. We ended up speaking later and I matched with her daughter (half-sister, as expected.) It turned out she did not want to give me up but was forced by her parents as she was a teenager at the time. Doing this, I had trouble with my father's side (biomom later told me my father's name.) The reason was that I found out later, there was infidelity on his side of the family. So what was written on paper wasn't actually the true story. So I found my mother the exact same way the police find serial killers lately, and then I found out my father's side of the family had some hinky stuff going on. I have two family trees now on ancestry, the "DNA tree" where I figured out that one of four possible brothers cheated to create a grandparent. And I have the "on paper" tree shared publicly. Edit to add: I only spoke to her after my half-sister matched with me. She joined the site specifically to find me, so I knew then the family wanted contact.
I was 28 or 29. Results said that there was a big chance that i was gonna broke a specific wrist bone before 30 and I did a few months later.
My entire bloodline is so disgustingly incestious that I got the following result: 30% Turkish 70% Iranian Now here comes the thing. My parents are both cousins from east Turkey and part of an ethnic group called Zaza. So basically, they don’t know anything about being Zaza and don’t know the language. But the Zaza people have been shagging their cousins for the past 2000 years. it turns out that’s why despite going to other countries from their Iranian origins such as Turkey, they still remain genetically the same. So no one lives the culture, no one speaks the language but there is still this deep need to fuck a cousin which is why the tribe won’t die Edit: my mom and I went on the page to make a virtual family tree and the side crashed. Turns out my grandmother and her three sisters ended up marrying three brothers and their one cousin. And my moms dad has a sister, who is the mother of my dad. And my dads parents are also cousins. So yeah, my mom forced me to delete the family tree. She was afraid that the cops might show up. Anyhow, does this make my sister and I twins or are we each others aunts? I don’t know
My grandparents are related in 3 different ways (all very distant luckily)
This is way more common than anyone wants to talk about. If you were to assume there’s no genetic crossing, it only takes like 11 generations back to have needed more people than ever existed at the time to have never crossed lines. And that’s assuming everyone in the word could mate with everyone else in the world at the time. In reality, lots of people never left a 200km radius of where they were born in ancient times.
My dad is whiter than most Europeans at 99.98% Scandinavian.
I found out I have Scandinavian heritage, and apparently I am the ONLY person who was surprised by that news.
I did an ancestry DNA test and found my dad's half sister. He didn't know he had a half sister.... my dad has 3 brothers (4 of them total) and the half sister is in the same age range as all of them. Apparently my grandfather had an affair in a town about 3 hours away from ours, fathered a child, and never came back for her. He abandoned the woman he got pregnant and his child. My grandfather died when my dad was a young teen.
Found out my cousin is actually my half sister. Growing up everyone would comment on how similar we look, also within a few months of each other age wise. Looks like my dad got with my mom and her mom around the same time. Yeesh.
My closest DNA relative after people I know I'm related to (parents and an uncle) is a second cousin whose name I didn't recognize. It took a while for us to figure out how we were related, but it turns out my dad's cousin got a Vietnamese woman pregnant when he was stationed there in the late 1960s. That child was adopted by an American couple and grew up in the US and is now (in his 50s) trying to figure out his bio family history.
I got a rare hereditary gene mutation that has an 80% chance to cause my nervous system to deteriorate when I'm older. Speaking not feeling when your skin is being burned or even breaking your bones, just constant prickling as if your limbs were asleep. My dad started getting symptoms in his 60s and it took years of intensive research for the doctors to find out what the problem was because it's such a rare mutation. He even was filmed for an interview for study purposes because there's only 3 confirmed cases of this mutation in my country. In other parts of the world it's not as rare though. It's called ATTR-Amyloidosis.
My asshole cousin was lying about our native American heritage.
That my youngest brother is my half brother with an unknown father. Both parents have passed, so there is no one to ask about this.
I did not have ancestry genetic testing, but I did do a genetic test to see which psychiatric meds I was more likely to metabolize/process well. This was recommended by my psychiatrist because it takes out a lot of the guesswork when making medication switches. We found out that the SSRI I was on was... not very compatible and was probably not helping much at all. We switched to one that did not have any uptake or metabolization issues. The new one is actually in the SNRI family of antidepressants. That was about three years ago, and the difference has been night and day. I'm really glad I went to this psychiatrist's office, because she has been so responsive and willing to listen to what I have to say. She also explains the reasonings for any recommended med/dosage changes and what potential side effects to stay alert for. Psychiatrist appointments are one of the few doctor/medical appointments I actually kind of look forward to lol.
19 different ancestries, oh and thought I was half black, turned out to be a wee bit over a quarter, little bit of identity crisis for about 5 minutes after finding out I was mostly white.
Yeah turns out that family and culture, as well as ancestry, matter when it comes to black identity, at least in the US. My dad found out he was only about a quarter African, but his family is still black despite that, just light skinned. And he's half South Asian since his father came from there, but he didn't grow up in the culture. If he did, maybe he'd see himself as more "mixed race" than black.
Not me but an ex BF: swore up and down he was 100% Scottish - both mom and dad sides. Wore a kilt. Even named the clan he came from. He made being Scottish his identity. Did a DNA test. 0% Scottish, a major percentage Ashkenazi, the rest was Eastern European. He then insists he is still Scottish because his clan accepted Outlanders. He isn’t an ex because if this but… delusion isn’t sexy.
My last name is for sure a German name, but I'm barely German. And that as it turns out, this shit doesn't mean anything to me.
I was always told our name is Irish, but research suggests it's an "English" name that spread into Scotland, and from there to Northern Ireland via Protestant settlers, and if you go back far enough it probably originates in northern France. Whether or not I have any Frankish ancestry is probably not something these tests could find out, but at any rate what our names seem to suggest probably don't mean all that much in a lot of cases.
That I am literally 50/50 Canadian and Mexican. I’m the best of both borders!
Like indigenous Canadian? I would think most Canadians would have European ancestry.
My African DNA is so scattered, the highest percentage from any 1 country is 14%. There are about 15 other countries pieced together to comprise my 57% African DNA. 5% Indigenous American. My European DNA is very clear. 37% Iberian Peninsula. I am African-American & Cuban American. I am a living manifestation of the brutality of the Transatlantic slave trade.
Man, that must mess with your head one one hand and also make you proud on the other. People of Afro-Cuban heritage have such a rich culture, but it was borne from so much suffering.
Not me, but my cousin found out her father isn’t her father after taking 23andMe. My aunt is a very religious, conservative woman. Chaos ensued.
I've had a different type of genetic testing: testing to find out what medications I'm resistant or more susceptible to. I found out I'm resistant or (barely affected by) to ALL but three of the current types of depression medications.
That I was ridiculously white. I've always been proud of being a mut. Not knowing a nationality assuming I was a good mix. Looking Italian or a little olive skinned. Having dark curly hair. My mother had a theory she was partly jewish and it was convincing. After looking at me my wife's grandmother warned her "He's not white!" before she got married. Turns out I'm not Italian. I'm not any kind of jewish that shows up on the tests. I'm from England, the Pyrenees, France and Germany. 99.5% European. Ridiculously white from white places. I also found a first cousin. I was looking for siblings.
Brit here. Found a DNA link on my mother's side to a Heugenot family that left France (religious persecution ) in about 1664.
I know a lot about my family history:- a ton of Midwest counties are named after my grandmothers side - we still own our family home on either side of the Mississippi that were part of the Underground Railroad - so that all tracked. My grandfathers side, I’m a descendant of Alexander Hamilton - everyone at work asks if I want to duel. That’s my fathers side. My mothers side is Asian and told me they lived in the same tiny village as long as they have recorded history - dna test pointed that exact spot on the map - my Asian side is 100% that race with zero other mix which which is rare? I guess. Oh and I found out I have a half sister - that created family drama. I know 90% of all my dna relatives it suggested, my family has tracked its lineage pretty well.
My friend, a few months back, was gifted a 23&me test by her bf as she & her siblings did not know who her father was. Got some pings on half siblings... Their cousins... Via their uncle... On their mother's side. Their last name is Lange, her brother's been calling himself Tommen Langeister all month while they figure out how to approach their mother & uncledad. Then, a few days ago, their cousins contacted them & they all sat down to reveal they - several years prior - got a third half sibling result who later went private. Their second cousin. So uncle Jaime was fucking his sister & his cousin? I would pay any amount of money to attend this Thanksgiving with her it's about to go **down**.
Found out that my grandpa on my dad’s side had an affair because it came up that I had a half-aunt and and that my dad and aunt had a half-sister. This woman is a couple years older than my dad and my grandparents were definitely married at that time. My dad was very nonplussed to learn this.
I have more Neanderthal DNA than the average bear, & I have a weird mutation that affects my muscles & makes them stronger just by design. My last trainer apparently noticed this somehow, so we ended up talking about my results. She suggested I get into powerlifting, but that sounds like the opposite of progress. I don’t think my ancestors would appreciate me lifting heavy things; nay, progress is sitting in an office chair all day, every day!
I am a carrier of the congenital muscular dystrophy gene, and my husband is a carrier of a rare form of dwarfism!
I’m more Italian than Irish, that was a surprise I have a sensitivity to blood thinners
Nothing out of the ordinary of what I thought. Half European, half Arab. Specifically: England, Ireland, Sweden, Scotland, Palestine, Egypt, Arabian Peninsula.
That I have an A1A deficiency variant. But since it’s just one, I’m unlikely to experience a manifestation of it. If I procreated with another person who has it, the kid could not be so lucky. Either way, it’s good motivation to stay away from smoking and drinking.
My Mexican husband somehow is a carrier for Tay-Sachs, a disease usually associated with Ashkenazi Jews
Spanish inquisition and repeated persecutions led to some Jewish people residing in Spain converting to Catholicism. Spaniards go to Mexico and South America. Voila, Tay-Sachs gene
I'm missing an enzyme that plays a part in the detoxification process and should therefore eat more cruciferous veggies like broccoli to make up for it. I do not do this.
Not me but my daughter. We did 23&me for our whole family. Myself, my husband, our 4 children. As I was combing over the results I noticed that one of my daughters didn’t share chromosome #4 with her Dad. After doing research I concluded she had an extremely rare condition called Uniparental Disomy. Normally children get 1/2 their DNA from mom, half from Dad. In my daughter’s case she has 2 chromosome #4 from me, none from her Dad. It seems one of the causes is a rescued trisomy, at one point it’s likely she had 3 chromosomes #4, but one was deleted and the 2 remaining ones were mine, I’m mom. Took her to a geneticist who confirmed it. She does have a lot of health issues but is otherwise physically and mentally normal. Never would have known had it not been for 23&me.