Question of the Week: What surprises did you find from DNA testing? [closed]

Question

Did a DNA test reveal any surprises for you or your family? Tell us about them with an answer below! You could also use the question image to share your answer with friends and family on social media.

Comments

Finding out I have second cousins I never knew existed (adopted out of family.)

Finding a genetic connection to the Washington family.

Getting a test result which shows I am part Asian and central /South American. I assume Native American Ancestry but unproven so far.

---

2 1/2 sister, tons of cousins and nieces

---

This wasn't actually from DNA, but my initial delve into genealogy led me to find a family member had another child before meeting his wife. We found out over 40 years after the fact!

Answer 1

Well, the biggest surprize, of my life, was finding my maternal family through a dna test in 2018. From a first cousin match, to my birth mother, who unfortunately past in 2002, and a 12 years younger maternal half brother and a family who has received me with open arms, even though no one had any idea I existed.

Through Ancestry and more so Wikitree, I now have traced my family back to Magna Carte times, and a 23rd great grandmother who gave birth to two Kings of England.

Who knew!

So, after 68 years of not knowing, I now have half the family I never knew or had.

Now on to Dad.

As always special thanks to all tge Wikitreers who do such incredible work.

Answer 2

Mine happens to be a perfect July 4th story (and July 5 too!)

A few years ago a man named Keith Whitten found one of my WikiTree profiles and sent me a private message saying that we might be distant cousins.

Keith said he thought that my brickwall Whitten ancestor, Samuel H. Whitten, was the brother of his ancestor, Richard Eli Whitten.

Honestly, I was a little skeptical about our connection. Keith's sources were second and third-hand family genealogies. I'd done as much research as I could years ago and couldn't find any record of Samuel Whitten's parents. Frank Gill and others even helped here on G2G and couldn't break through the brickwall.

I asked Keith if he'd be willing to take a Y-chromosome DNA test and he readily agreed. When the results came back, we were a perfect match.

What makes this especially cool is that behind my brickwall was a Revolutionary War veteran, Richard Whitten (1763-1845). 

From his pension application, on July 5, 1820:

Richard Whitten, aged 57, of Cornish, July 5, 1820. Private in Capt. Williams's Co., Col. Sprout's Regt., Mass. line. Original declaration made Apr. 13, 1818. Pension No. 7,468. Affirmed. Family: Mercy, wife, aged 55; Richard, son, aged 16; Samuel, son, aged 14 ...

Chris

Comments

Yes, that was a great and cool discovery Chris!

Answer 3

I had a little surprise with 9% Germanic. I knew about English and Scottish before I started doing genealogy, and I expected to find Irish also. Also my husband has about the same DNA as I do, except he does not have Germanic. Two of my granddaughters have the last name Huffman, so I expected Germanic  DNA from them. That was a surprise that they had such a tiny amount, so I guess that I am the only one in the family with Germanic ancestors, and I expect they are from my mother’s family.  My mother went to a medical convention in Munich the year before she died. She had a wonderful time, and I think she would have been pleasantly surprised to know that Germany was part likely of her heritage.

Answer 4

My biggest surprise was that I had some percent Eastern European/Russian DNA in it. When I asked my mother to do a DNA test, it intensified. She had 20% Eastern Europe/Russia and 7% Baltic States in her DNA. Since I could not confirm this in her previously known ancestors, I assume that this DNA came in through her father, who is unfortunately unknown.
But maybe one day this will help to find out something about him.

Answer 5

Two second cousins found me through DNA, one each on father's side and mother's side.  It was very easy to trace the paper trail and oh-so-good to have these family connections.

On the down side, I was dismayed to find that I have many thousands of matches on both ftdna site (where I tested) and gedmatch.  Even the number of closest matches (1st-3rd cousin) are in the 2 thousands on ftdna, so I have given up on a plan to try to identify cousins this way.

Answer 6

When I received my 23&Me ancestry report, it said that I am 1.2% Ashkenazi Jewish.  They further predicted that I had an ancestor born in Eastern Europe between 1700 and 1750.  I suspected that the Ashkenazi DNA must be via my dad's side, which is mostly Germans from central Europe.  But Dad's report said nothing about Jewish, and Mom had  a greater percentage than I did.  So the Jewish markers were on my mother's side.  This was perplexing since Mom is 25% Swedish and 25% Norwegian, and her other known ancestors all came from England or Ireland.  I know Jews dispersed widely, but those are not the countries you usually think of first.

Further research of my maternal English line led me to a Loyalist ancestor who had resettled in Canada after the American Revolution.  His son had married the daughter of another Loyalist in Toronto.  Her mother was named "Judy" Meyers.  She too had escaped Rhode Island with her family and resettled in Toronto. 

Many New England Jews were also Loyalists.  Turns out "Judy Meyers" was born "Judah Meyer."  She was the daughter of Benjamin Meyer (1733-1776), a Hungarian Jew who immigrated to Providence, RI, where he became the first Shammos (sexton) and Shochet (ritual slaughterer) at the Touro synagogue in Providence--which is the oldest synagogue in North America.  The 23&Me prediction was amazingly accurate!

Comments

Most of the posters on G2G are still operating as though genetic testing is as reliable as it was about 10 years ago. 23andMe in particular is getting terrifyingly accurate, down to the city/municipality level, for some people (of course, a lot depends on the sample pool and size they happen to have for a given ethnicity).

---

Indeed, in the case of my mother's Norwegian and Swedish lines, they accurately predict the specific municipality of origin for her 19th-century immigrant ancestors. These are regions with modern populations in the low thousands. When I consider that I post the same info (backed by sources) on their Wikitree profiles, I don't find this particularly terrifying.

Answer 7

Well I cannot reveal names but a 3rd cousin on my father's side found me , they were adopted , and helped this person figure out it was on my dad's side and who their 3rd great grandparents were , they are still working on narrowing it down , but I am glad I was able to help as much as I did to figure out that much , still hoping to figure out more about my great grandfather on my mother's side , her father's father is a mystery

Answer 8

I tested a number of years ago and then tested all three of my adult children a couple of years ago. Two of them came back exactly as I would have expected. The youngest daughter, however, came back with 10% Asphardic Jew. I know that 10% is small in the great scheme of things but it gave us all pause for thought! I am fairly sure it sneaked down the line from an ancestor or two of my mother-in-law as her heritage includes German from way back. They lived in an area close to Spain/Portugal where the Jewish people were made to leave and scattered through the region. Somewhere back then, there was one or more Jewish ancestors! My daughter wears it proudly as she says she has always told us she was different!!

Comments

I'm surprised by this result:  2 kids have no Asphardic DNA, but the third one is 10%?  This seems impossible unless they had different fathers.  In my case of 1.2% Ashkenazi, my 2 siblings share this percentage.

---

Imagine our surprise!! I don't know how this came about but...that child had two kinds of cancer about four years ago. Besides the surgeries there were two rounds of chemo - 8 months in all. So, maybe that threw her test results off a bit. Then again, maybe she just inherited that bit of DNA from her father and the other two did not!

---

Exactly!  It is just the randomness of DNA inheritance at play. We do not inherit exactly the same DNA as our siblings.

One should *never* rule someone out as a father based on the ethnicity estimates!  And certainly not just because it doesn't match the other siblings.

---

whooaaa!!  very interesting.  i mean, i know siblings won't be exact matches, and can have different mixes...

but sometimes, when i'm digging into my own mysteries, I forget this fact.  your story reminds me to take a step back and do more testing.  :)

---

Addressing the randomness of DNA, another story from my own experience.  I needed to triangulate to confirm the parents of one of my 2x great grandparents. I did not have that little chunk of DNA so either my Dad did not have it or it got filtered out of what he passed on to me. One of my first cousins had it and one of our aunts had it so I was able to use one of them to do the triangulation. I did have a large chunk of DNA on other of my paternal lines - just did not have that one!! Moral of story - test as many relatives as possible. Thank goodness I had one surviving aunt in her 90's at the time and she agreed to the test!

Answer 9

My health results on 23andMe say I have misophonia. It explains everything.

Comments

I had to look it up. I thought it was just my <family member's name redacted> bad humor. lol Wow, to know it is a real thing makes me feel better and worse for said redacted family member.

Answer 10

Nothing especially large for me; DNA in my family has mostly proven what we already knew to be true. I suppose the largest surprise was the fact I showed Eastern European/Slavic heritage, which we later managed to confirm through records, a family which  had been a major brick wall (though DNA played no part in solving the wall).

A dear friend of mine who hadn't known who his father was got his DNA tested a while back, but hadn't actually tried to use it to determine who his father was until he invited me to look into it. Finding that identity wasn't especially difficult (a paternal aunt had taken a DNA test), but the major surprise was that the small percentage of Eastern European DNA that had shown up on an otherwise entirely British ethnicity estimate, which he & I had initially assumed was some sort of fluke, actually turned out to be real, a family who settled in Canada from Ukraine.

Answer 11

I found out that I am almost 49% Human!

Kidding... actually, on both Ancestry DNA and 23&me DNA, I am showing between 1% and 3% Norway. I kind of always new about the English, Welsh, Scottish and Germanic parts, so that was a little surprise. Maybe I have some Viking (not football) ancestors.

Answer 12

For me it was finding out that I am a DNA match with my ex-husband’s sisters. So, I am assuming that I am also a match to him…5-8 cousins  

Strange though because they are from a different area of Italy than my ancestors, and that’s the only possible way we can be related I think…

Both sides of their family were born and raised in Italy (Naples and Calabria). My ancestors are from Sicily. 

Answer 13

My paternal grandfather was not named Lowery and I have at least hundreds of distant Ashkenazim relatives (that I know of).

Answer 14

I have a cousin, that has a strong tree going back generations. They are showing as 297 cM across 11 segments. They are listed in the web site as being 2-3rd cousin. Funny thing is, none of the surnames match anyone in my family tree. There is absolutely no correlation between me and my family history. I have tried to disect the relationship and come up with a blank. Every other match this close to me makes sense, this person just pops up like a dog in the middle of a room full of cats.

Comments

My very best match at ancestry, much more than my first cousin's daughter who is #2, has all the same locations but none of the same names as I do in her tree. There is obviously a secret here.

---

I think someone has been wandering into the wrong bedrooms of history! I have two more of them now. All are too close of a match for me not to know how they are related. I grew up in the same small coummunity with my cousins and saw their families frequently.

Answer 15

I've shared this before, but I found out that my dad was not my biological dad several years ago now. Having 0% Italian show up when I had the records showing my grandmother had 100% Italian roots was my first hint. Rather than Irish-Italian roots, I found out I have a lot of Swedish and Dutch ancestors to research now. My comparatively pale skin makes a lot more sense now! I've now matched with both of my biological paternal grandparents on Ancestry DNA.

Answer 16

Primarily that I did NOT have any Native American ancestry after having been told I did all my life. I had not been able to confirm it with other records, anyway, so I was able to discontinue that fruitless search.

Answer 17

Since I caught the Genealogy bug about 10 years ago, I have made several "discoveries" or "surprises" about myself that I was totally unaware of beforehand.

• DNA ethnicity estimates vary wildly from one testing company to another... even with the same sample transferred to a different company. Yet each of these samples are very similar when uploaded to GEDMatch.
• Y-DNA testing reveals that I have a lot of folks with the "Wright" surname somewhere in my past. I was hoping to find the origins of my surname, but as of now this hasn't happened.
• AuDNA confirms that it is highly probable that I descend from at least one Mayflower passenger.
• AuDNA confirms that it is highly probable that I also descend from English and European royalty.
• And you can't 100% confirm any relationships with DNA beyond the first few generations without a good paper trail!

It is kind of neat though finding out you're 6,512,435th in line to British throne :-).

Answer 18

All of my 'surprises' have been good.  I found several cousins (all had been given up for adoption) and helped them determine their birth parents.  I found my grandmother's father, which allowed me to further research and add to that 1/4 of my mom's lineage.  I found out my dad truly does descend from 'Captain' George Athy who immigrated from Ireland to Maryland in the mid-1600s.

Comments

More than a handful of my best matches at Ancestry are from the same areas of Maryland as my folks (baltimore/carroll counties) but have none of the same surnames in their trees.

Answer 19

My son, my husband and I all had our  tests done. The biggest surprise is that when we found my husband's bio family, we discovered that he and our children, and grandchildren are of Portuguese descent, from the Azores Islands. Huge surprise! We had been told he was of English/Welsh descent. It's been so much fun connecting with our new families.

My surprises were European Jewish, Indigenous Americas-North, and Nigeria (very small) but I know that several of my ancestors in the Colonial South were slave owners, and I have a condition, Keloids, that's found in people of African, Asian, or Spanish descent.  

Comments

Does this "keloids" have to do with the way you scar? If so, this happens with my youngest daughter, too. A small percentage of African shows up in her DNA and in mine.

---

Yes, Suzanne. Scars that form as thick and rubbery are keloids. My biggest scar is quite large....several inches long.

---

Thank you for verifying this for me. With our daughter, people are convinced that she's had heart surgery due to those keloids. She hasn't had heart surgery.  She actually finds the scars rather cool. She says they tell her story.

I think it is very interesting that it could be linked to our apparent, albeit small, percentage of African heritage.  We also descend from plantation owners.

Have a blessed day. :)

Answer 20

The biggest "surprise" for me has been just how interconnected and interrelated we actually are.  Half my ancestry is early colonial United States, and it is not unusual to have a match who shares ancestry with me on both my father's line and my mother's line.  (My parent's, according to GedMatch, are not genetically related.) Just got another one yesterday -- a third cousin on my father's side (common ancestors identified), and looks like a 5th or 6th cousin on my mother's side (need some more research, but I think I know where it is).