Still Behind

It seems I can't seem to catch up with these posts.  There are a number of things I think about to post here and then forget them immediately.  So that puts me way behind in updating.  Maybe I am busier than normal.  Yeah, that's it, I'll go with busy.  

A while back my Dad and I both did the DNA thing.  Mostly out of curiosity.  We also are hoping to someday unravel the mystery of who is Grandfather was.  All his life he has been told he is 100% German Heritage.  While that may be true in the definition of 'heritage' it isn't necessarily so with DNA.  I can't give you a detailed description of how this DNA thing works or even a brief summary.  

It is much too complex for me and I have only scratched the surface.  We did discover that he is not exactly 100% German.  There was more British Isles DNA than anything else.  This didn't really surprise me as we have had indications, although very minor that his real Grandfather may have had that ancestry.  But this doesn't prove anything in solving that mystery.  With all the migration patterns over the centuries many of those cultures overlap several times and so the DNA has gotten extremely mixed.  Thus it can give a wide range of locations of where your DNA came from.  I think the biggest surprise that we both share a significant amount of Scandinavian DNA.  I suspected some through some of my genealogy research had indicated possible northern Germany/Denmark as ancestral grounds.  Oh, and mine differed on the fact that I had Iberian peninsula DNA.  What?  Reading further it reveals that the Celts migrated to and inhabited a large portion of what is now Spain/Portugal.  I am assuming that is why it shows up that way for me.  It has to be from my Mother's side, Dad had none.  The largest portion of my DNA was also the British Isles, with mostly Irish, Welsh, Scots  DNA.  I'll be getting my bagpipes and kilt soon LOL.  This is what I expected.  

This is my break down without detail:

Thousands of years ago

Ethnicity Estimate

•  33% Great Britain
•  27% Scandinavia
•  40% Other regions

What it amounts to is, I'm a mutt.  But I know more about how much of a mutt.

I have been trying to get my Mom to submit DNA also, but she says she already knows what hers is. 

I just shake my head, she confuses DNA with heritage.  Honestly I think she is a bit afraid of what she might find out.  Her family (mother) didn't care much for her ancestry, they embarrassed her to be honest.  I think Mom gets a lot of that characteristic having listened to the stories over the years.  My Grandmother would always ask me 'when I was going to be through with all this genealogy stuff.' She just didn't understand my interest at all.  It only brought back unpleasant memories, it seems, to her.  She always avoided things that could possibly bring her any heartbreak.  That is another story all of it's own.  So I was never really able to get a lot of info that I needed from her.  

Now that I have the results in hand I can't do much more without help from others that show up as sharing DNA.  Those would be the people that would have the info I seek.  However, that costs more $$ than I care to spend at this time.  So I will have to sit and wait for one of them to get motivated enough to contact me.  It is a never ending search once you get into genealogy.

Happy Trails.