I’m enjoying MIchael W. Twitty’s* The Cooking Gene*, which has a long section on how Twitty, who is black, used various companies’ DNA tests to learn about his ancestry. He was able to learn a lot more than I would have expected about his African ancestry.
I am still amazed that with all the tests they get, they are so accurate with children, siblings, cousins. But that’s DNA for you! A cousin n Scotland and one in England that I never knew existed made contact with me because of ancestry.com.
The discussion about Ashkenazi Jews reminds me of my 9th grade history class. The teacher went around the room asking everyone what their ethnic background was. People said Irish, Italian, German,Japanese, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Negro (this was the early 70’s, people didn’t say African-American yet), and every Jewish kid (me included) just said “Jewish.” The teacher, who was Jewish as well. challenged the Jewish kids, saying Jewish is a religion, not an ethnicity, and asked us where we were from. We then said things like, The Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. He said, no, where are your families FROM? and we all said New York or America. Try as hard as he could, none of us would claim another country’s heritage, except for the one kid who was born in Israel. Finally, he pointed to me and asked where my parents were born. I said Brooklyn, so he asked where my grandparents were born. I said they were born in what is now (meaning was then) the Soviet Union. He said, so you are Russian! and I said “NO, I AM NOT. My grandma told me the Russians didn’t want us and we are NOT Russian.” Flash forward many years to my DNA test - 96% Ashkenazi Jewish, ZERO percent Russian even though all 4 grandparents were born there. Grandma was right all those years ago. I am 4% Scandinavian, which seems to bear out a family legend about a traveling salesman who converted to Judaism and married into the family at my grandma’s grandparent’s level.
@techmom99, that’s exactly what my parents said when I was in elementary school - I was American and that was that no matter where my grandparents came from because Jews weren’t citizens in Eastern Europe/Russia. Haven’t had my DNA done though.
@Bromfield2 My husband and I used a genealogist from an agency in Poland to help us tour the area in Poland his father came from. It was fabulous. He served as our tour guide and translator and driver and took us to remote villages in Poland where we searched old church records and visited little village halls, met the village clerks. One clerk was so excited that we were looking for relatives that she called the oldest person in the village and asked if she remember the K*** family. That person was able to point us to a cottage where my FIL had probably been born. It was amazing – -- we found relatives that we didn’t know about and were invited in for tea. Helps that we have a VERY unusual name – fewer than 100 people with that name in Poland today, fewer than 50 in the US, AND there is a Polish monastery by that name. We went to see the monks with our guide and found out the story.
We found the agency by searching the internet. I found/researched a few and hooked up with the one that seemed the most promising.
A reminder for any of you with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage to get tested for Factor XI Deficiency if you ever need serious surgery. The carrier frequency is 1 in 11. You don’t want the surgeon to be surprised with a clotting disorder. 
@marilyn -
I only did my DNA because we had a spare kit. H doesn’t believe that his father was actually fathered by his grandmother’s H, in large part because his dad was many years younger than his siblings and because his dad was given his own mother’s maiden name, not her married name. He had finally located a cousin who agreed to take the test, but the guy died before we could send him the kit. So, I used it. However, I used a throwaway email address and have not uploaded my results anywhere and I didn’t agree to be searched for. I don’t like most of the relatives I know, why I would want to find new ones?
@techmom99 and @Marilyn - I have always said that I am Jewish when asked, “What are you?” I never say, “I’m America.”
@emilybee - I also always say i’m Jewish. My HS teacher was pushing for more beyond that, which is why kids started giving other answers.
I think when people ask, in ordinary conversations, it’s a curiosity about what part of the world one’s family experienced local cultures and conditions. Not really the technical interest we share on this thread. SImilar to where did you grow up? We look for common links and unusual places.
It turns out that Iosif (with my maiden name) is my father’s first cousin! We always assumed that none of his family that stayed in Russia/Ukraine survived WW2. And since my grandfather died when my dad was a teen, he never asked a lot of questions about his family history. His son (Vladimir) contacted me through FB.
@techmom99 Conversely, my dad, who was Jewish, always identified as Russian and Hungarian, where his parents were born. He grew up Orthodox and even so, Jewish was not the sole way he defined his ethnicity. My mom was Protestant, so my DNA test came back at 47 Ashkenazi and some broad Western and Northern European on her side, so it wasn’t that definitive. My DNA uploaded to Gedmatch in the Eurogenes “admixture” section doesn’t break down to Ahskenazi and lists more Mediterranean and Baltic root than I would have suspected.
Our local news ran a story last night about 5 sisters in their 60s that were reunited. I can’t find a link. Only the oldest knew that there were other sisters. I gathered that the first three went to a children’s home because their father didn’t believe they were his (DNA shows all 5 were his), and the 5th one was raised by her own mom, not sure where the 4th was. How awful to have your children hauled away because your husband thinks you’re cheating. The parents are gone now.
Another recent story in the news about a woman taking a DNA test and realizing she wasn’t related to her parents or siblings. She discovered she was switched at birth:
Back in the 80s I was involved in some research that included HLA-typing individuals and families. HLA are the “tissue typing” proteins that are commonly tested for transplantation purposes. Similar to testing the underlying DNA, HLA testing can often tell who is related to whom. And it was not uncommon to find families where the testing clearly showed that one or more of the kids was not fathered by the family dad.
We always kept our mouths shut about it. We weren’t going to spill the beans about what might be an unpleasant family secret. And that’s also why it’s much more accurate to do genetic research on rats and mice instead of humans. With lab rats you can make sure the parents recorded in the data are in fact the real parents. With humans not so much. Human behavior being what it is, the data on human genetics and family tree documentation is always a bit muddy.
There was a story on Dateline (?) this week - a woman in Montana ran her DNA only to find she had a sister in Vietnam! Apparently, unbeknownst to him, her father had fathered a child during the time he as stationed n Vietnam. Once the shock had settled, he and his wife travelled to Vietnam to meet the daughter he never knew. He and his wife spent a few weeks in Vietnam while they arranged for the emigration of the newly found daughter and her husband and their 17y/o child. Now, they all live ‘happily ever’ after on the family farm in Montana…!
Muddy, indeed. What often matters is the family relationship, not the genetic reality.
So, what happened to the Vietnamese mother- she’s chopped liver?
@lookingforward The mother died when the daughter was four; daughter was raised by the grandparents. According to the story, the girl had a rough upbringing i.e. racism due to her AmerAsian ‘make-up’, poverty, hunger etc. That said, she seems to have made a good life for herself. she owns a coffee-shop, is able to put her daughter through school etc. IDK what the husband does, he didn’t say anything…
@lookingforward - the Vietnamese mother passed away when their daughter was only 4. The girl was raised by her grandparents. Her father left Vietnam before he ever knew the mother was pregnant and he never knew about his daughter.