I have done a lot of my Italian family genealogy research. . If you go to a Mormon Genealogy center near you, (FamilySearch.org) they will help you discover the actual documents of your ancestors’ births, death, marriages etc. Usually at no charge or minimal fees, less than $10! They have had people go all over Europe and elsewhere and visit villages and churches. Then the made copies of every single parish and government document and they store these on microfilm in Utah. Google it! It’s amazing to read the actual documents about your ancestors from hundreds of years ago.
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My H and I just did the ancestry only test for 23andme. The spitting was hilarious and we did it while FaceTiming with our S who was thoroughly entertained.
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Yeah it’s kind of shocking how hard you have to work for a teaspoon of saliva
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My brother and I tested on Ancestry.com. My father’s first cousin is also on there. One day, a new person popped up who was shown as having a relationship to me somewhere between my brother and my father’s first cousin. I had never heard of this person before, which is odd considering how close the relationship is. I started sleuthing, and finally determined that it was highly likely my maternal grandfather was her biological father. I have not reached out to her to discuss this - would you want to find out at 80+ years old that your father wasn’t who you thought it was?
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@fireflyscout , can this new person not also see you and your father’s cousin as a relationship to her? I would think that, if someone has done the spit test (lol), then they or a family member are monitoring the results. Maybe they are hesitant to reach out to YOU for fear that YOUR father is not who you thought it was.
I have not done the test, but my daughter did. She showed me the overview of her results, but I don’t have access to it. She seemed most pleased (yet not surprised) that she is 40% Irish.
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I got mine back a few weeks ago. I found that H and I are NOT related. Good to know!
A couple surprises–being 100% Polish, I thought I might have some Jewish ancestry. But that was 0%.
The most surprising thing was that I was 2.5% Italian, and I’m not sure where that came in. (guessing it was one of my grandpas- -they were both dark/brown-eyed). On 23andme you can see which parts of which chromosomes correspond to various ethnicities. H’s is very interesting–multicolored stripes everywhere because he has a big mix of European/Native American/African/Jewish. Mine is pretty much solid Eastern European, a little German and Scandanavian, but ALL of my Italian heritage is found on one of my X chromosomes, which is nearly 100% Italian. That seemed strange to me.
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My husband and I love the Henry Louis Gates show. We doubt it would be worth the money to get tested; our families are both 100% 20th-century Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. Not many surprises among recent immigrants from that genetically isolated group. It might be kind of a hoot to see how closely related we are.
Which of the ancestry companies gives you more detailed information about your European ancestors?
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@Hanna, I thought I was also 100% Ashkenazi but in my written family history discovered that my maternal great grandmother’s family actually came from Spain, then went to France in the 1700’s, then to Germany and finally landed in Lithuania. So, I am also a certain percentage Sephardic - even thought all my relatives who immigrated here in late 1800’s-early 1900’s came from Lithuania, present day Belarus, Ukraine and some unknown part of Russia (I have very little info on my paternal grandfather as he died when my dad was 14. I only know he came from Russia, landed in Galveston, TX and made his way to New Haven as he had relatives already there.)
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From Spain- a large number of Galicians who ended up in Eastern Europe, many on what’s now the Polish-Ukrainian border, an area also called Galicia. On another thread, surprised to see how many of us CC-ers have Galician roots. I had thought this Spain connection was family jibberish, for a long time, til I ran into my first person with the same lore and looked into it.
This “six degrees” is wild.
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I am debating doing this with my husband. My lineage is very clear back centuries but my husband is the classic American mutt so it would be fun to do this and share with the kids. My guess is they will be wary of privacy issues.
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23andme gives the option to destroy your sample once the ancestry test is completed if anyone is concerned with the lab having your DNA.
There is a good YouTube video explaining the whole process
https://youtu.be/U3EEmVfbKNs
Galicians – there is a site called Gesher Galicia (https://search.geshergalicia.org/) which has lots of birth, death and marriage records recently published in cooperation with Vad Vashem and the Polish government. I have a birth record for one of DH’s grandmothers – it’s in Polish, but his mom always said her family was from Austria-Hungary. Translated the birth certificate, and the grandmother was from Galicia, in what is now western Ukraine. That area has changed hands so many times in the past 120 years. Got on Gesher Galicia and found three more generations in two other nearby towns, at least as far as the records go (1871). NEVER thought I would find info on the grandmother’s trees since their fathers abandoned the families when they were young.
DH refuses to do the 23 & Me. I’m game – I have a good bit of info about my dad’s side, but not much on my mom’s. Too many Norwegians with similar names, and Germans who were in fact Polish.
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@musicmom1215 - LOL, after checking out my genetic relatives, I can safely say that my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are exactly who I think they are. The person whom I believe was fathered by my maternal grandfather (my grandmother divorced him early on for cheating) has not been on Ancestry since they received the results. The account also does not appear to be managed by another person. So I fell pretty confident the results were not what they were expecting and I will respect their privacy.
While I have tested with 23andme, I find Ancestry much better for finding and confirming blank spaces in the family tree.
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“Which of the ancestry companies gives you more detailed information about your European ancestors”
I have wondered the same thing, and whether the results now are any more detailed than they were a few years ago. I know that I have a lot of different ancestries (“North American Mix” is my general term for this), but how much of which ones is difficult to know.
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@lookingforward @Madison85
So do mine :-0
If any of you have loaded the “We’re Related” app from ancestry.com you’ll find most NewEngland types from a certain time period seem to be related. Those long, cold New England nights with not much to do I suppose…
I’m confident my ancestry would come back as 100% Cold Northern European Places. I’m looking for more detail than that, wondering which business would be give me more localized information.
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@CountingDown, that is very cool! I thought I might be able to dig a bit deeper in my family’s history but in our written family history (I went looking for names and towns) the town where both my great great grandmother and great great grandfather were born is north of Galicia and it noted that was unusual for Hasidim who mostly lived in southern parts of the Pale, in Ukraine and Galicia. I put their names/town in anyway and came up with zilch.
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@Emilybee, many towns in that part of the world have had several names over the years as they changed from one country’s hands to another’s. There are soundex catalogs for names and towns, too. I’ve run into a dead end with DH’s paternal side – the census records all say Russia, except for 1920, which says Latvia. His last name would actually make sense in Latvia – it’s more of a Germanic name than Eastern European/Russian. Now if DH would do the spit test, I could find out if Latvia is really in the picture. Don’t know if one of my kids would do it.
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“His last name would actually make sense in Latvia – it’s more of a Germanic name than Eastern European/Russian.”
Isn’t this common all over the Pale? My last name is German-derived, but everyone who has it came from what is now Ukraine.
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