But, having been asked since the first Kincaid/James book why, as an American, I wanted to write about England, I was curious about my life-long Anglophilia. My mother's side of the family had names that might have been French variants (Dozier and Jordan) and I'd heard something vague over the years about being descended from settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee, so I thought perhaps there were French Protestants on that side of the family. But on my dad's side, I had no idea. Darden, my maiden name, is not a common English name, but neither is it French.
So a few months ago, I did an internet search, and found a Darden in Plymouth, England, in 1601. Curiosity in full gear now! Then I got a Facebook message from a man in British Columbia who was doing research on Ancestry.com and discovered that our grandmothers were cousins. When I looked at what he'd found, I traced the Dardens back to Alabama in the early 1800s, and the Doziers as far back as Normandy in the early 1600s. There the trail died out--at least so far.
I decided I wanted to do a DNA test, so Rick gave me 23andMe for Christmas. I spit in the test tube and sent it off! (It takes a LOT of spit, by the way.)
Last week I got my results and it's fascinating!
That British connection?
70% British and Irish
The French?
11% French and German
Then there's another 15% or so Broadly Northwestern European.
All very cool, if not hugely surprising. But--
It seems that sometime in the 1700s, I had ONE fifth-to-seventh great-grandparent who was 100% Scandinavian. Who knew?
And in the 1600s, a how-many-ever great-grandparent that was 100% West African. It shows up on my DNA map as a tiny red dot among all the blues. Now I want to know that story!
What I didn't find was Native American, although I'd always been told that there was some Cherokee on my mom's side of the family. But the results show 0%.
And then there were all the things I didn't expect to learn. Like that I have the gene for fast twitch muscles, like those Olympic skaters you've been watching. (I think I'm a total fail on that one...)
I have more Neanderthal variants than 96% percent of customers--which makes sense as that was central Germany.
My genes show I prefer salty to sweet (true), that I don't have cheek dimples or a cleft chin, that I have dark hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, that I can taste bitter things, and that my big toe is longer than the others. I don't have a unibrow or red hair. Isn't that just bizarre?
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| Those aren't dimples--just laugh lines! |
There are dozens of other interesting things, and especially having studied biology and genetics in college, I could easily fall down the research rabbit hole.
I know that these tests are not 100% accurate, and that the different testing companies can get slightly different results depending on their data bases. But the more people who are tested, the more accurate the data gets, and I LOVE following that genetic fingerprint..
What about you, REDS and readers? Do you find it creepy or fascinating? Have you done a DNA test, or would you like to? If you have, tell us something interesting you learned!
