What surprised you most about your DNA test results?

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Most people aren’t really expecting surprises when they do a DNA test, but almost everyone gets at least a small surprise – if they look hard enough at their results.  Some people find out that they have different biological parents than they thought they did, others discover new close relatives, and others find out that their ancestors came from a completely unexpected part of the world. 

In this post, I’ll share some of my own “surprises”.

I would love to hear about your own DNA surprises below in the comments!

I found out that my mother had two first cousins that she didn’t know about

Surprise!

When I first did my DNA test test, my closest DNA match was a complete mystery to me.  I had no idea who she was, where she lived, what her name was, or anything about her at all. 

It took me a while to figure it out, but eventually I did learn that she was a first cousin to one of my mother.  I thought that she would be my only “DNA surprise”, but it turns out that yet another previously unknown first cousin to my mother did an Ancestry DNA test recently, and showed up as a match for me.

These first cousins are on different sides of my parent’s family.  One of the cousins is a child of an American soldier stationed overseas many years ago (I don’t want to give more details to protect privacy). 

Since I have other extended family who spent time overseas in the military, it makes me wonder if I will eventually find more cousins in the future.

I learned that I don’t have any Native American DNA

Surprise! I’m not the only person who took a DNA test wondering if their family’s story of a Native American ancestor could be proven by their results.

Knowing what I know now, it seems silly that I actually thought that I would find out that I have Native American in my DNA results.  Through genealogy research, I learned that my family’s stories were true, and that I do have an indigenous ancestor on my paternal grandmother’s side of the family.

My Native American ancestor is very far back in my family tree. My 10th great-grandfather was the son of an indigenous woman who was likely a member of the Matinecock peoples of what is now Queens, New York City. Since she is such a distant ancestor, it is possible that I inherited no DNA from her, or that the amount that I inherited is so small that it wouldn’t be detected on a DNA test.

One of the reasons that I wanted to do a DNA test many years ago was to see if I did have Native American DNA.  Many people in our family thought, based on the complexion, hair color, and facial features of certain recent ancestors, that perhaps we had a hidden Native American history. 

My grandmother probably wasn’t as Jewish as I thought she was

My mother’s family often said that they thought that my maternal grandmother may have had Jewish ancestry, but she isn’t alive anymore to take a DNA test. So, I expected my DNA results to show a lot of Jewish ancestry.

Once I got my results back, I discovered that while my grandmother did have Jewish ancestry, she wasn’t “very Jewish”. My results showed that I am only 3% European Jewish.

Later on, I asked my mother to take a DNA test and she only showed 4% matching the Ashkenazi Jewish region. We were eventually able to confirm that this region was passed down to my mother from my maternal grandmother using the Ancestry Origins By Parent tool.

I found out that my one of my grandmother’s siblings was a half-sibling to her

My grandmother, the one who I thought maybe was Jewish, was one of seven kids.  When she was about nine years old, her mother died of tuberculosis. 

A few years after that, she lost her dad to the same disease, which I wrote about in my post about the Great White Plague, if you want to know more.  All seven of the kids were split up, going to live with different relatives, orphanages, or striking out on their own as children. 

My grandmother lost touch with her siblings, including her second-to-youngest brother, who I learned died in the 1960s.

We thought that he had died young without marrying or having children.  Through my genealogy research, I did find evidence that he had married, but I never knew if they had had children or not. 

That is, at least, until I got a DNA match who had my great-uncle is her family tree.  The thing is, it is clear by the amount of DNA that we share that my great-uncle was not my grandmother’s full sibling.

Surprise!

I may have had ancestors from Iceland

Most DNA testing companies periodically update the results of their existing companies based on new technology and scientific advancements. The best part of this is that we don’t have to take a new DNA test.

The most recent update of my Ancestry DNA results showed that 2% of my DNA matches the Iceland ancestral region. Since I only inherited a small percentage of DNA matching this region, it is likely that my Icelandic ancestor was very far back in my family tree.

I still have a lot of research to do to be able to determine whether the Icelandic DNA is true, and to find the ancestor who passed it down to me.

You don’t have any surprises?  Are you sure about that?

If you have already done your DNA test and you didn’t notice anything surprising, I would be willing to wager that if you took a closer look, you would find at least one thing – either through your DNA matches or ethnicity estimate – that you had not expected to learn. 

Depending on how far back in your family’s history your “surprise” took place, it can take a little more digging.  This is the fun part though.  Take another peek and let me know what you find!

What’s that?  You haven’t done a DNA test yet?

I have had an amazing experience with my DNA results, and I recommend it to just about everyone that I talk to.  With that said, I am sure that you have noticed that there is a trend with just about anyone who takes a test: 

You probably will find a surprise.  It might be a small surprise, but it could also be a whopper of a shock. 

If you are ready to really learn what your DNA can tell you – and I mean anything that it can tell you, then you should definitely get a test.

If you don’t think that you would like to learn a surprise about your family, or if you don’t think that you want to know if you have close relatives out there in the world that you don’t know about, then I would caution against DNA testing. 

When you do a DNA test, you are opening up yourself and the rest of your immediate family to the discovery of information that can dramatically shift your family’s paradigm.

There is always a chance that your family is super plain vanilla and there’s nothing surprising out there, too.  I’m just saying if you do a DNA test you have to be ready to accept new information that might contradict what you always thought was true.

Learn more about DNA testing here: Autosomal DNA testing

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed reading about the surprises that I received from my own DNA results.  If you have already done a test, I would love to hear from you about anything surprising that you learned.  And if you haven’t done a test, I would love you to share what you think you might learn, or what you would like to learn about your family. 

Finally, if you aren’t going to do a test, I would be interested in understanding why you have decided not to take that step.

Thanks for stopping by today!

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