Comment on (i feel really stupid asking, but what the hell!) could i be of french descent?
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 10 hours agoYou’d be better off doing actual genealogy, which involves research, reaching out to family members, combing through dusty family heirlooms, following up on leads and stories, gaining access to historical documents and records, and more and more and more research. It’s not so much a conclusion you’ll come to as a process of discovery you’ll go through and a story you’ll piece together, potentially over a lifetime. If you’re lucky the pieces will be very solid and well supported, but more likely they’ll be hazy and questionable and quite possibly completely false. It will lead you in directions you never would’ve suspected. DNA can sometimes play a part in that process, but it’s no substitute for it. Especially it can help connect you with distant or not-so-distant relatives who may be able to fill in huge pieces of the family puzzle, or may be no help at all, but maybe it will not be about the answers you get as much as the friends you meet along the way. Trite but true.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 9 hours ago
Yea, a sibling did a DNA anaylis and it doesn’t match what we know (our family history is well understood due to people tracking it since the 1700’s.)
Most people in the US with my surname come from a very small set of immigrants (3 or 4) from about 1700-1800.
The thing is, my genetics are heavily influenced by who each generation married. Easy to see just on the US tree how quickly genetics mix, and it’s not like those immigrants were purely anything either.