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Finding Identity in My DNA
This just in: I am 0.00% Cherokee! According to Ancestry.com DNA I am 96% Irish and Scottish, 4% English, Welsh and NW European.
My Irish last name originates from a Norman guy who fought in the battle of Hastings in 1066 and was awarded lands somewhere in Devonshire, England. Three or four generations later, one of his descendants (probably a second or third son with no shot at inheriting the family estate) joined the Norman invasion of Ireland around 1170 and secured land for himself somewhere in County Tipperary after which my Norman invader ancestor went native.
I guess I could claim to be Norman nobility but (barring some other source of Norman lineage – they did rape a lot of Irish women) that would be about 30 generations or about 1 in 1,073,741,824. Even Liz Warren would laugh at that.
Almost 50 years ago, I was given a month in Ireland by my parents. At my aunt ‘s direction, I went to the tiny, dumpy little town where the Norman forbears established themselves and our last name began. There was a stump of a ruined castle just outside of town where I imagined my forbears drinking while the place fell apart over time.
I went to one of the two pubs in town, ordered a shot, and raised a silent toast to those who decided to leave that dump and others like it so I could be an American. I have never needed any other identity since. I don’t understand why any American ever would.
Published in General
Amen.
I have not had a DNA analysis done, but given that my forebears came from Europe, I just tell people my race is Neanderthal.
Hey! Me too!! We must be related.
Lovely post! I have to say that these ridiculous commercials about people trading in their kilts for lederhosen drive me nuts! It may be interesting that several generations ago, some ancestor came from somewhere else, but in no way does it determine your cultural identity.
I guess it’s important to some people.
I’m 1/2 Norwegian (father’s side), 1/4 French, 1/8 English, and 1/8 German. I didn’t need to take a DNA test to tell me this, only knowledge of my family tree.
According to Ancestry DNA, I’m 85% England/Wales/NW Europe and 15% Scottish/Irish. That seems to generally bear out genealogically as well, roughly 12.5% Swiss, 25% Scottish, 6.35% French and 56.35% English.
I’m just a mutt. Pure American mutt.
Good for you.
My grandchildren include African-American, filipino, Italian and some midwestern German/Nordic stock. Within a few generations, my family will likely be from every continent and ethnicity. I have eight kids, grandchildren #8 and #9 already on the way. I’m feeling like a diversity Abraham, my many descendants eventually linked to every race and ethnicity.
In the old WWII movies there was always an Irish, Polish, Italian, Jewish guy etc in each platoon (usually commanded by a WASP). Distinct ethnicities but a common Americanism. The weird thing is that as we become a much more mixed-ethnic, mixed race nation, tenured idiots want to emphasize and mandate ethnic and racial distinctions that no longer clearly exist. It should be easier than ever for us to be one people but it has become harder. Because of malignant morons.
Did they tell you how much Neanderthal DNA you have? That is the most important thing.
Probably more than Elizabeth Warren has Cherokee.
Once I heard about Moore v Regents of the University of California I vowed to never willingly give anyone my DNA. Not that it’s not already out there somewhere, but I at least have to make it a little bit of an effort for them.
No mention. I was hoping for a trace of Denisovan just for cocktail party purposes.
Of course, without that Neanderthal trace, I presume I must bear full guilt for being of genocidal Cro Magnon descent. I am duly ashamed of my CroMagnonness and look forward to adult classes in CroMagnonness studies and the opening of the first Neanderthal student center (.000001 % probabilistic mitochondrial DNA match required) for some serious grievance studies that implicate ALL currently existing races such that the Neanderthal survivors get to go the head of the grievance pecking order.
Funny thing is many Europeans have around 2% Neanderthal DNA which means that it is possible the Elizabeth Warren is actually more Neanderthal than she is Cherokee. I think we need to see the full set of result. #Releasehergenome
Don’t insult the Neandethals.
Its tough for white boys today. To be told on a daily basis by the media, teachers, etc. that you are the reason for all the problems in the world is a heavy weight to bear. Renouncing your identity is a quick, easy fix. Just like young blacks who are told that by having black skin, they have no way to succeed in our culture, the easy solution is to fight the culture.
Frankly, none of this garbage is true. This is all just a tool in the statist, Marxist arsenal to get everyone emotionally invested in self-destructive thoughts that they can use to enslave.
But is it their identity? White as an identity is the most feeble of things. What does it even really mean beyond its place in academic writings about race? I would argue that white as an identity does not objectively exist. Unlike let us say black (which is really a short hand for African American cultural identity which is a real sub culture with all the associate markers: dialect,food, music, art, politics, etc). But white identity isn’t a thing? People are trying to make it a thing by subsuming actual ethnic identities into it like German, Irish, Italian, Southern (US), New Englander, French… pick a European country or distinct American region. It is a category so broad that it lacks cohesion. No one can think of themselves culturally as white because it includes too many characteristics for any one person to hold. So faced with the prospect of having so loose and broad an identity imposed upon you what choice is there but to reject it and find something that fits. Those who do want to make white a thing are really just in the business for degrading actual cultures and fussing them into this chimera called “whiteness”.
I reject it. We should all reject the label. Not out of some miss placed sense of guilt or shame for the hypothetical actions of our ancestors, but because it is a meaningless, soulless construct of insipid academics and racist. Be a Midwesterner, A Southerner (American), German, French, Italian, Romanian, Irish, Californian, New Yorker (the city), be anyone of those things, but for the love of all that is good don’t be White. It doesn’t mean anything. And how can you have pride and respect for something that is meaningless.
I know that’s true of some who fancy themselves leaders in that direction, but I think 90-plus% are ‘whites’ who decide that if they are going to be blamed for the problems of the world, called out for ‘privilege’ and made the butt of racial jokes, that they may as well ‘own it’ and find something positive. As you say, that doesn’t lead to a coherent sub-culture, but it’s nonetheless real.
I’m just fine myself with ‘American’ in the original e pluribus unum flavor, and believe that is still worth defending.
That is America’s gift to the world – we re a nation of mutts.
I never thought about this until I was sitting in a Danish cafeteria with two American friends. And looking around at the other 120 folks in that large room, I realized, they all could have been cousins. Sure, some were taller or plumper, or wide faced, or thin faced, but they all looked Danish.
Even attending family weddings in Chicago, I had never seen such an homogenous group before.
We are mutts to the core.
It’s a long long way to Tipperary but my heart’s right there.
As my Grandad used to say I’m not white I’m Irish.
Keep in my mind that African-Americans refers to primarily Western Africans who miscengated together in slavery times. They started with a heck of alot of cultural and genetic diversity but after the thresher of slavery they became one people (more or less). In this sense, they are more like the off-the-plane African immigrants in America. Nigerians of the Igbo tribe consider themselves very different from Ethiopians of the Tagane tribe. Sort of like how Hungarians think of themselves as being quite different from the Irish.
I’m from a part of Iowa where there is a saying – If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much. To say people are proud of their Dutch ancestry is an understatement. The town over from my hometown has an annual Tulip Festival. All the churches are some version of Reformed. The “V” section of the phone book takes up half the pages. I could go on and on.
I recently read the book The Island at the Center of the World. It is a fascinating look at the Dutch influence in early New York, and by extension, the American founding. At one point it talks about how the Dutch in The Netherlands were very tolerant and so people from all over went there. It said that in the 17th century there really wasn’t such a thing as a “typical Dutchman” because of the influx of people from all over Europe and Northern Africa. (I highly recommend this book, btw.)
So I’m thinking if I had a DNA test, even if my ancestors went back several generations in Holland (and my parents have documented back 5 or 6), my DNA could still be all over the place.
Very interesting, @oldbathos! I’m waiting to hear back on my percentages from Family Tree DNA too in the next few weeks. I ordered a full mtDNA analysis in August right after I sent my youngest off to college. Figured I’ll have more time to explore our family genealogy now that hubby and I are empty nesters (woohoo!), and wanted more info than I got from the National Geographic Project results I received in the early 2000’s. Cool thing is, they say my mtDNA is a rare type found in Ireland and a few other places in Europe, but it traces back to the Middle East and Central Asia, where it’s a very common haplotype. So I’m a red headed, freckled, Irish-looking Middle Easterner genetically. How cool is that?
Three days before the extremely unfortunate Warren DNA announcement I sent off for further testing to find out what my estimated ethnic percentages are, so hopefully my order got in ahead of the rush they’re probably experiencing now. From what I’ve read from comment boards my particular haplotype has a wee bit more Neanderthal than average (2.6%, somebody said) and there’s a big memory study that says my particular genetic makeup may have some protection against Alzheimer’s. One can hope!
Has anyone gotten different results than their siblings? There’s a legend in our family (frankly, the only interesting one) that my great grandfather brought a Spanish bride back to Ireland, accounting for my father’s black hair, dark skin and dark eyes. (I used to tell people he was the gardener)
My two sisters inherited his coloring (as opposed to me and my brothers, who look like walking melanoma time bombs) and I am trying to talk one of them into spitting to see if they got something more interesting that this:
Well if they are your sisters they really can’t have a different outcome because you have the same grandparents. Best you’d get is a slight change in the percentages 87 and 12 something like that. Unless of course they aren’t really your biological sisters. I think there are case where this has come up in genetic tests, and then that leads to some awkward conversations with your parents.
Hmm. That’s not how it was explained to me/
https://genetics.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/same-parents-different-ancestry
I haven’t had mine tested. I’m the last of seven. I always let my elders go first. ;-)
However, in the small (single digit) percentages, there’s wide variation among my siblings. One has some Sephardic Jew, another has Ashkenazi Jew. One has a significant Irish component (over 10%), others have almost none. Only one has North African(!) (score the minority of color lottery?!). But, we’re predominantly Anglo-European. And, we knew that already.
One of my brothers refuses the test because he knows he’s French. He read the French poets in high school and college and taught English in Lyon for a summer. He’s French. Don’t argue with him.
You were taught correctly. Siblings can share DNA, theoretically, from zero percent to one hundred percent with the average being about 50%. If the parents have very diverse backgrounds, meaning they are of mixed, but different mixed races, the variation is more likely to show than if all of the ancestors for six hundred years lived in Ireland, for instance.
That’s weird. Why did it show WC making that comment ?
I must have pressed the wrong quote button. 😈
You are correct. Unfortunately, children are labelled before they have the tools to fight it like you are able to. If you don’t have a supportive family and supportive mentors outside of the family, helping you along and that support system is replaced by people seeking to enslave you, it is very rare to reject the label you are given.