Finding out your not who you think you are

[jibarodepr]

Does that explain the Horn ancestry? I'm confused.

Or from my Middle Eastern one.

[Fished]

I grew up thinking I was Hawaiian.... after doing some genealogical research it looks like my family just claimed to be kanaka to cover up their black ancestry...

[ari87]

Or from my Middle Eastern one.

My dad surprisingly got some Horn of Africa (2.50%) in his DNA Tribes. I think it's likely from his Bantu ancestry (general East/Southeast Africa) though, since he didn't get any Middle Eastern ancestry.

Anyway, before DNA testing I had this idea in Middle and High School that most of my European ancestry was Irish. I took a few Irish step dancing lessons , I still wear a Claddagh ring and a necklace with Gaelic writing on it that I got for my 13th birthday, would go to the St. Patrick's Day parade in NY every year with my real Irish friends. But then I found out that my European ancestry is way more Scottish, English and Dutch than it is Irish. My Irish score in Ancestry Finder is pretty dismal. I was kind of shocked, but whatever. One of my dad's 4th cousin matches is a really nice (and cute, although that's a bit awkward) guy from Northern Ireland, so that was pretty cool to connect with him.

[modernsappho]

It's more about finding certain connections that didn't necessarily expect:

One of my connections is a 2 difference match and is one of the top heads for at least 2 DNA companies. His Mtdna is L1b and his Y is J1. Phenotypically he looks more Middle Easter, though.

(and cute, although that's a bit awkward)

Eew you're still related

[Hammer]

I found out that I'm 100% European. Judging by that the scores which were higher than expected were in Scandinavia and Ireland, I'm guessing that my allegedly "Native American" grandmother is of the darker phenotype from Ireland, her hair is kind of curly...

http://www.americansurnames.us/surname/RANK/

Also, my surname is particularly uncommon, over a hundred thousand names are more common than it here in the US, so I was kind of surprised to find online, a man of the same surname, whose earliest known paternal ancestor had the same earlier, different spelling of it as my line, as I've been told, once had...yet this guy had a different Y-DNA.

[ajd_nyc]

My mom remembers her dad joking about his mom being Native American (his dad was full-blooded Irish Catholic) to explain why he, my mom and her sisters were so dark and didn't look Irish or WASP. My mom's cousin vaguely remembers being told by his mom they were French Canadian.

We're still trying to figure out what, exactly, our family is. We're ethnically Irish Catholic, but my mom has frequently been mistaken for Greek or Italian; my oldest aunt had completely black hair when she was younger, and another of my aunts had curly hair that was often described as not being the hair of a white person (at least not white in the Northern European sense).

People who see pictures of my grandfather's mom's family variously describe them as looking Jewish, Romani, Levantine, Bulgarian, Mediterranean French, Greek and Serbian, yet Census records going back more than 200 years make them out to be WASPs. They may have been adopted or something, so we're planning on doing DNA testing.