Today is a rather special St. Patrick’s Day for me. I’ve always worn green on the 17th of March but felt like phony because I wasn’t Irish. For years, I had heard stories about my ancestry – English, French and Polish – backed by stories from my family on both sides. Also maybe Native American? So in December I decided to find out for certain, and bought a DNA kit from Ancestry.com and sent in a saliva sample. It took almost nine weeks, and the results were a surprise. Large percentages of my DNA were indeed English, western European (French) and Eastern European(the Polish) but also 12% Irish!
I recently took a trip to Maine to do some research and learned that Maine was a major center for potato production for many years, and still is (there’s a potato research facility just south of Presque Isle), because many Irish immigrated to Maine and southern Canada during the potato famine and brought their agriculture with them.
Then I recalled that my father had once mentioned offhandedly that his family, the Parsons, had settled in Maine a long time ago. Lightbulb! Parsons is an Irish name and maybe they came to Maine during the potato famine. So now I need to get on Ancestry and do a little research.
Anyone else out there interested in their ancestry?
Yay! Now you can celebrate with a Guinness beer. We’ve been thinking about the ancestry test, except I think I know what mine would say. My mother and father both are from the same small village in Romania. Their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, not sure how many generations back, but many, are all from the same area. Don’t think there’ll be too many surprises in mine.
I see you’re also Eastern European, like me. 🙂 Woo-hoo!
So now it’s easy being green!
I have cousins on both sides of my family who have done a good deal of research on our family trees. No skeletons to speak of yet – on the one side there’s a boat builder, on the other a Scottish lead miner. A lot of mariners in the family – not surprisingly, really. Tends to happen when you live on an island 🙂
That’s so cool that you can do that now. I’ve been interested in my ancestry for a long time, but my family isn’t well-known for staying on good terms with the generation before their own (even me), so I’ve never been able to get the details. Maybe it’s something I’ll have to check out one day. 🙂
Alex Hurst, fantasy author in Japan, participating in Blogging A-Z April Challenge.