For many years I did not really care about my family history and didn’t really know much more except my parents birthdays and some information about my grandparents. This changed back in 2015 when a former colleague mentioned something about his family tree research. For some reason I was immediately interested and started my own research. Within short time my family tree had more than 200 (now over 300) people in it but I ran into many problems finding information regarding my father’s side of the family. Reason for this was very simple: World War II happened and the area where he was born belongs now to Poland. Most records had been burned back in the day so we had very little to work with.
Then I read one blog post from Lani called “Identity, what is it good for?” and there she mentioned about a DNA test her brother had taken. Fast forward to the year 2017 where I decided to take a DNA test at FamilyTreeDNA. At first there were problems with sending it to the United States and then somehow I kind of forgot about the whole thing. This year I read yet another blog post about DNA tests by Katie from Hot & Sour Blog and I got into the whole research again. I checked upon my results from the previous year and even found distant relatives living in the USA whose ancestor with the same family name as mine “Glander” migrated from Germany back in the 1870s or so. As I was back into the reseach game I contacted researchers for Info about my father’s family and got few interesting information already and I hope more will follow. Anyhow these DNA tests give you also a approximate Ancestry composition and I was fairly interested how “messed up” my ancestry was.
The DNA results from FamilyTreeDNA I uploaded in DNA.land and also on the platform where I am doing my family tree research MyHeritage. All three platforms gave me about the same result regarding my Finnish ancestry between 48% to 49% which is really no surprise at all as I am half Finnish thanks to my mother. The other results vary as for example DNA.Land does not go too much into detail and thus there is for example no “Scandinavian” listed. So according to the other two tests I am for around 32% Scandinavian. No this is certainly nothing I got from my mother as Finnish people are not Scandinavian. I believe that the reason for this is very simple as the area where my father’s ancestors come from is Pomerania and that area belonged to the Swedish Empire for a while.
The rest of the of the my DNA is Baltic/ East European. This I got from a very small percentile from my mother as her ancestors from her mother’s family side are from Ingria an area between Estonia and St. Petersburg. Then the rest of the Baltic Genes are from my father as Pomerania/ Prussia extended to the Baltics. The rest of the tiny Percentages I have in the various tests are <2% Asia Minor according to FamilyTreeDNA, Ashkenazi 3% via DNA.Land and last but not least Melanesian 1% according to MyHeritage.
What do I learn from this? Not really anything new except that I am not Central European at all. To take it further I am genetically not really German at all, at least not central German as the German Empire spread throughout a lot of areas back in the day so it can be said the Prussian’s are not even genetically real Germans to some degree depending on how German people are viewed. For some reason I have the urge to force my wife for a DNA test to see how much she is Han Chinese but I guess I will never be able to convince her to waste money on such a test.
Have you taken a DNA test or are doing some family research?
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Crazy Chinese Family 