Description: Exploring all aspects of my retirement and my Genealogy obsession
Around Thanksgiving, I went to lunch with a group of childhood classmates. During a lull in the conversation, one of them asked – “Hey, who here has done their DNA?” A number of us raised our hands. His next question was, “What did you think – was it right?” And I sighed a little.
Of course it was right. There are no wrong answers, and DNA really doesn’t lie. The real question he was asking (and he clarified this) is, “Were the ethnicity results what you expected?” For the first quarter of 2018, with an extraordinary number of tests sold during the holidays, we expect literally millions of new DNA test results to flood the test sites. The first thing most people will do is look to see if their ethnicity estimates match their expectations.
People take DNA tests for a lot of reasons. For me and my close family members who have tested, it was to see if we could find matches to help us take our paper research back a few generations. For adoptees, it is the hope of finding biological family. But for an increasing number of people, it’s just to discover or confirm a cultural or ethnic identity or two. They’re sure they will find that Native American, Asian, or French link they’ve heard about in family stories. Or they KNOW they will be 50% Polish