Who do you think you are?
Have you ever wondered where you come from? No, I don't mean the simplistic "I was born in X place or Y country", but rather, your roots. Many of us would possibly declare, quite sincerely, that we are 100% this, that or the other. For many years, well into my 40s at least, I honestly thought my roots were a combination of my dad's Norwegian family and my mum's Danish family, so Scandinavian essentially, with my birthplace being Norway.
In 2017, after watching a fascinating promo ad from ancestry.com (this one: https://youtu.be/Fw7FhU-G1_Q?si=eCD5_G8tMqF5xlyw ), I decided to explore my ancestral DNA, and see whether I was actually Scandinavian only, or whether there was more to my history. (I also want to clarify that I am not promoting ancestry.com, and I paid for my test, in case anyone is wondering).
Going back just a year, in 2016, my world was rocked a little (okay, okay, it was a lot) when the results of the Brexit referendum were announced. On the 24th June, the lid to Britain's 'Pandora's Box' opened, and in my humble opnion, things will never be quite the same again. Xenophobia started crashing loudly into public discourse, with people becoming unafraid and unashamed to say the quiet words out loud. I'm not naive, I know that xenophobia existed before 2016 in the UK - heck, I even had to sit and listen to an English step-uncle talk about "wogs" and other decidedly uncharming phrases whenever we visited. I hated hearing that kind of talk, and it's probably the reason we didn't visit very often. Things were a little more frosty closer to home when I discovered that my step-dad had voted leave, as had my brother. These were men who both had foreign wives (my sister-in-law is from Malta), and I was utterly disappointed. All of these people, falling for the schtick being spewed by the rightwing media, the Conservative government, bullshitters like Farage and the like. Suddenly, England had become a country I no longer recognised. I'd experienced xenophobia in person a few years before, when a woman followed me home after a perceived road rage incident, and then shouted at me to go back where I came from after hearing me speak. When I accused her of being a xenophobe, she told me she was married to a black man, so she definitely wasn't racist/ sarcasm. Thankfully I had my phone in my hand as she was leaving, so I snapped a photo of her licence plate, and then called the police. I was worried that now this woman knew where I lived, I might experience unwanted damage to my car, etc. The police came to see me after visiting the woman, who apparently lived locally, and assured me that she would not be visiting me again. A few days later, they contacted me again, saying that I could pursue a case of racial discrimination, should I wish to make it. I declined, and it wasn't lost on me that the interviewing officer was German, and had moved to the UK and gained British citizenship. Those bloody migrants, eh?
There were other occasions, when people would talk about foreigners in not such polite terms, and when I reminded them that I, too, was a foreigner, I'd usually get a nervous "Oh, but we don't mean you!" which irritated me even more.
Anyway, back to the DNA test...
I sent off for a pack, and this plastic vial arrived, which I had to spit into (up to the line), and send back in a prepaid box. Once the package was received, ancestry.com emailed me and said the the process usually took a couple of weeks, and that they would email me once the results were ready. Several weeks did indeed go by, and then the email pinged into my inbox! With shaking hands, I logged into the site, and was quite astonished by what I found - my "ethnicity estimate" was 99% Europe, and less that 1% Pacific Islander! What?!? For a moment I thought I'd received the wrong results, but when I looked at the European part, it said Scandinavia = 61% (huh!), Great Britain = 25% (take that, you Little Englanders!), eastern Europe = 6%, western Europe = 3%, Finland/Northwest Russia = 2% and the Iberian Peninsula = 2%. Well, blow me down... there was my 100% Scandinavian assumption blown to smithereens!
The Pacific Islander tickled the pants off me - being overweight, I used to laugh and say that must have been my Samoan genes. The eastern/western Europe percentages were a bit vague, but as I've learned since April 2017, is that as the "gene pool" of curious people grows, so the results actually become more refined. How can I be so sure? Well, when I signed up, I never gave them any personal information, apart from my name and my email address, so they weren't matching DNA data to any information I might have given them. A year or so later, the data had changed, and suddenly my broad hips were no longer due to some mysterious Samoan heritage. Things were becoming a bit more detailed, and instead of Scandinavia being this blob, it was being broken down into Norway = 46%, Sweden = 21%, England, Wales & Northwestern Europe = 15%, Germanic Europe = 11% and Finland = 7%. Huh... so the British percentage was reducing, and the Iberian percentage was gone.
One of the benefits of having this data is that it gets updated on a fairly regular basis, and you're not paying any extra for this service. It does offer the chance to surprise you, though, and about a year later, I was learning even more: Norway 55% (complete with a breakdown of regions) Sweden 28% Germanic Europe 8% Finland 7% England and Northwestern Europe 2%
So while I wasn't wholly Scandinavian, I was most definitely northern European, which makes a lot of sense when I take into consideration things like my eye colour (blue/grey), my fair skin which does not tan easily, and my height (I'm around 175cm). My hair was blonde as a child, then became darker as I grew older, more strawberry "bronde".
The next update went a bit like this: Norway 50% (again, detailed regions) Sweden & Denmark 41% (hello Denmark, welcome to the game) Finland 7% Germanic Europe 2%
England was gone, and while the data bounced up and down around the Scandinavian genes, the Finnish 7% was interesting to me. And nobody mentioned why, until I took a two week trip to Norway, aboard one of the fabulous Hurtigruten boats that travels between Bergen and Kirkenes, right up in the Arctic Circle, near the Russian border. I had posted photos of the trip, both there and back, which was quite the adventure (remind me to share that with you another time), when my Norwegian aunt emailed me, and casually dropped the information that my grandfather's father had come from Vardoe, an island in the far north of Norway, above Finland! A-ha!
About a year later, yet another update: Norway 38% Sweden and Denmark 36% Germanic Europe 13% Finland 9% England & Northwestern Europe 4%
This time, I was able to determine which bits came from my mum and which from my dad, and the 13% Germanic Europe was interesting me now. Around about this time, I was having therapy, finally, to deal with stuff I'd dragged around with me like a dead weight for decades, and during a conversation with my mother, where I discussed the trauma of not knowing much about my Danish relatives whilst growing up, I had felt like a bit of me was missing. (I should just add that my parents split up when I was very young, and my dad got custody of me, and I never saw my mother again until I was 20.) That's when my mum dropped the biggest bomb of my life to date... my Germanic genes were because my Danish grandad's family were Jewish, and had previously lived near the German border with Denmark. When Europe became a bit of a tinderbox in the early 20th Century, the family moved more into Denmark, settling in Aarhus. You could have knocked me for six.
Sadly, my grandfather's beloved uncle was one of the Danish Jews to die at Bergen-Belsen before the war ended, and my grandfather, having married a Jew, divorced her, and set up home with a Danish gentile. Judaism was gone from his life, and my mother and her sister were raised outside of the faith. The Jewish line technically passes through the woman, so I too could call myself Jewish, but I've been an atheist for most of my life (my childhood was spent attending Lutheran Sunday schools, and I have a bible somewhere in my possession - it feels a bit wrong to throw it away, despite my atheism). I'm still mentally processing this information, and to be honest, I don't know how I feel about it, but I can understand why my grandfather made his choice.
My most recent DNA update came out last year and reads as follows: Denmark 37% Norway 31% Germanic Europe 15% (Ticino in Switzerland gets a mention here) Finland 8% Sweden 7% The Netherlands 2%
I have found it ironic that my supposed English genes have vanished and my Germanic genes have grown, given that I no longer live in England, and now live in Germany. I'm curious to know where the Ticino genes fit in, but ancestry.com have now decided to monetise things like the paternal/maternal breakdown, so until I decide to splash the cash, it will remain a mystery. I've completed bits of my family tree, and a few "cousins" from the US have been in contact. One of the interesting things ancestry.com has done is show on a world map where your cousin connections come from, and the US connection is not surprising at all, as my grandfather was one of seven children, and all of his siblings emigrated from Norway to the US in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, seeking a new life like many hundreds of thousands of Europeans did over the years. This ancestry breakdown has definitely made me appreciate both my ancestry, but also increased my empathy for migrants who have made arduous journeys over land and sea, in search of a better, less dangerous life for themselves and their families. I am so saddened by the increasingly hostile rhetoric that is gripping parts of the UK, Europe and the US, especially when the rhetoric is being stirred by people who are either immigrants themselves, or are first generation citizens in their new homeland. Migration has taken place for centuries, and when you read books like Sapiens by Yuval Noah Hurari, it makes one wonder what humankind will look like a thousand years from now. At the moment, it's not a rosy picture.
So, now that I've shared who I am, are you going to explore a little bit, and find out whether you are who you think you are? Or perhaps you have already, and you've also been surprised by your own results? I'd love to know!