I'm pretty sure I've said it before, but I've got enough cousins to start a small, inbred country. One cousin was one of Obama's ambassadors. Another cousin's band is going to be on Colbert tonight. as I live vicariously through my better cousin's successes!
After doing an AncestryDNA test a few months ago I now have hundreds of cousins. I also learned that I am the whitest person ever and my family's "we're totally part Cherokee" assertions were not confirmed by the test.
One of my cousins says he's 1/16th Lakota matrilineally on his Facebook profile. Well, his mom and my mom are sisters, and I know who my G-gram's parents were, and neither one was full blooded Sioux. I politely called him out on it once, and he took it down and said he was just making fun of Elisabeth Warren. A few months later, he quietly put it back up.
I want to do one of those tests for the exact same information. I've been told since I was a small child that my mom's (IIRC) great-grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee Indian. My mother was only a child when she knew her great-grandmother, but I remember my mom referring to her as a "little old Indian woman." If that's correct and my great-great-grandmother was full-blooded, that would make me 1/16th. I learned recently (maybe I knew in junior high but forgot) that DNA doesn't descend from our ancestors quite like I thought. I always thought that when, say, your father's DNA split, that it did so such that you had a 50% likelihood of getting the nucleotide on either side of the DNA ladder. But the DNA breaks in a way that there are great swaths of nucleotides from one side or the other. Thus, if you imagine your father's DNA as having a left and right side, the half that goes to you is composed of large runs from the right and left sides, not one nucleotide from the left, one from the right, etc. Based on the average length of these runs (and IIRC the average chromosome has 5 or 6 of them), you're much less likely than you'd imagine to have genes from a particular ancestor many generations back. Queen Elizabeth, though a direct descendent of William the Conqueror, probably shares no long sequences of DNA with him.
Move over. Had my DNA done several years ago. Came back 49% Irish, 49% German(ic) (could mean part unspecified Scandinavian), 2% "other." Every once in a while they'll refine it. The latest? 40% Ireland (even broke it down by county) 27% Germanic Europe 18% Scotland 9% Wales 3% Sweden 3% Baltics A patchwork quilt of "which shade of white would you like?"
That's pretty white, but I call and raise you: I got every single area where white people come from and avoided the areas with lots of olive-skinned people. On top of that I can't dance and have absolutely no rhythm. Like I said, whitest person ever. These tests are far from perfect, especially when it comes to an ethnic group that was mostly wiped out and very few are in the pool. It is possible one could have native ancestry that doesn't show up on the test. However, white people really want to be 3% brown for some reason, and often make shit up. Between an imperfect DNA test and someone saying "I'm totally 1.00253% native," I'm going to go with the test. The Cherokee myth in my family has more to it than simple claims. There are two letters from Civil War times saying something along the lines of "this dude just married a Cherokee woman." After I posted my results on Facebook, the holder of the letters said she reread them and her interpretation of them was that they were second marriages, and we're decedents of children produced from first marriages. So, it's not always outright lies that least to this kind of thing, sometimes it's assumptions and faulty epistemology.
