LIFE/ HUMANS/ DNA/ JOURNEY
DNA Journey: 50% Of Me
Part Three
How curious it is to discover that you are 12% this and 12% that, 14% this, and 21% the other. Well this happened to me recently.
The effect upon me is profound, and only serves to heighten my displaced sense of self. The self I have been trying to find my whole life.
Being so often the object of the gaze of others as a young woman, because, well because, I was so obviously not like them. And, as I narrated before, was viewed as ‘olive skinned’.
This viewing myself through other people’s eyes caused me to wonder about myself. And, I have been wondering ever since.
Until today.
If you ordered your DNA test, sent it off in the post and waited for something to come back in the post, maybe check your email. You may find a link to the results there.
I wrote about this earlier this year somewhere. My story has been buried. I suppose not many of you were interested in my DNA. And why should you be?
Yesterday, I finally found the email with my results (in the form of a pie chart) after typing in ‘results’ to my email search bar. I had forgotten they were being emailed to me and weren’t arriving by post.
I like pie charts. Funny that. Coming from someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy maths problems. I think it is the visual presentation that I find appealing.
I am, perhaps,
- 12% Scottish
- 12% Maltese
- 14% Welsh
- 37% (Eastern European)
- 2% (Sweden & Denmark)
- 2% Norway
- and 21% Irish
The Maltese bit is so interesting. (I like being Maltese.) I went to Malta for the first time in 2021. Lucky, I know. I wish I had known about my connections to Malta then, I might have paid more attention.
I spent a great deal of time in the war rooms and learnt all about how the area was attacked during WWII and children were evacuated to various countries, something I didn’t know about.
I wonder whether my father was evacuated from Malta. He must have been evacuated from somewhere, since he turned up with a small, brown, leather suitcase, and they had to guess his age because he was so small. I will never know.
Isn’t life strange?
I quite like the 12% Scottish. I have always like the accent. I did learn when reading English that the Celts originated in Scotland, so that isn’t as surprising as it sounds. I wonder whether I should assign an arm or a leg to my Scottish heritage. I suppose the Maltese bit is my olive skin and the Irish is my wavy hair.
How curious to be finding out who I am in my fifties, or is it who I am not? I am not 50% anything. Not that I didn’t already know. I didn’t, but I had a sneaking suspicion.
My father, who was adopted during WWII, passed away a few years ago, and I am still none the wiser. I did reach out to one second cousin on the database. I managed to piece together that maybe my Scottish great-grandfather married a Maltese lady and yet which side of the family that is, I do not know since I never knew my mother’s father (my maternal grandfather).
The strange thing is that the database is dependent on who uploads their DNA and how interested they are in connecting, for linking you up with distant cousins, etc.
A funny thing happened. My niece messaged me on there: ‘Who is this?’
‘It’s aunty,’ I replied, sheepishly, wishing I was some mysterious, long-lost relative. Presumably, it costs her money or a new subscription to message me because she didn’t reply. Ah, well. I did try to find my missed relatives, but I am such a mixture I don’t think it is as clear-cut as I imagined it would be.
‘Why,’ a reader who had somehow unearthed that story I wrote about sending off my sample of saliva, replied to my recent update on Medium, ‘isn’t it accurate?’ (I shared in my last instalment that it wasn’t.) Well, maybe not completely. Someone I know has studied epidemiology and told me there are reasons why it isn’t accurate in a language I did not understand.
I wasn’t really expecting the test to be the end all, be all. I merely thought it would be a window, a clue. And then the work of tracing ancestors with facts that make sense and link up; you know, like they do on that programme here in the UK, ‘Long Lost Family’. After messaging with my friend, the epidemiologist, the results are deemed somewhat tenuous. What do I know? I mean, don’t they catch people for crimes using DNA samples? I watched a programme about that too and in addition to a sample of DNA, forensic investigators need facts to place the person at the scene. Nothing is ever simple with detective work, no matter how Sherlock Holmes made it appear.
To save me paraphrasing what I myself do not understand, I was going to link to the white paper from ancestry.co.uk. (The site I used.) However, I note that is not possible, so I will quote instead,
‘AncestryDNA has employed a team of highly trained scientists with backgrounds in population genetics, statistics, machine learning, and computational biology to develop a fast, sophisticated, and accurate method to estimate genetic ethnicity for our customers’.
Cited: ancestry.co.uk (I am not affiliated.)
Accessed, 12–23–2023
So, after all, my DNA is really just an estimate. They do add a proviso that the figures could be widely different when they supply the ‘estimate’. I am still confused. Any epidemiologists out there that are not related to me might jump in and explain things, or feel free to write your own story and link to this.
My aim was to find some immediate family in recent history. I know we all can be traced back to Africa and we are all related, and I absolutely love that, but it is nice to know family, isn’t it? I would like to find some recent roots, especially now that I have a grandson to share the news with.
Having grown up with no nieces. nephews, aunts, uncles, or grandparents related to me, apart from one, my wonderful grandma, and briefly, my father’s adoptive patents (who died when I was quite young), I simply wondered.
I can’t say that I am any closer to the truth about my ancestry, but it was (for me, anyway) worth taking the test.
I have added my previous stories about this journey at the bottom of this story, just in case you are curious.
Key Message: I found out who I am – an amalgam – DNA Journey