AncestryDNA Gives Me a Sense of Self

I’m just about to undertake an AncestryDNA test. I’m both terrified and exhilarated about what it might find. DNA testing for genealogy is a powerful tool, and is gaining attention at the moment. DNA sequencing makes the subject of your investigation – your own cells, the stuff inside you. It is inescapable and accurate.

But what does it actually mean to do it? Does it change your life?

Before

I am an academic. I am a scholar. I write about things, I don’t do them! So what am I doing spitting in a test tube and sending it off for analysis? Why am I having my DNA sequenced for genealogical purposes? What will it change in me, if anything? DNA sequencing promises something final, a set of data that is not negotiable. It makes historical research like genealogy into something scientific. It takes research out of the archive and into the lab.

Having this kind of personal interest in your research is a very new thing for me. I am literally putting my research money where my mouth is. Yet I have decided to do this for a number of reasons.

I can hardly talk about the way that this kind of approach affects you if I have not done it, can I? I need to understand the strangeness that this might create in a sense of self. I need to experience how those who undertake DNA tests feel about the results. I need to know whether they do change their way of defining themselves.

I first spoke on this subject in Amsterdam, which is the city my Opa (Grandfather) was born in. He was a somewhat distant figure to me and I walked the streets and canals wondering if I could somehow gain a connection or an insight into this strange man who spoke with a thick accent and whose eyebrows were astonishingly bushy.

Can I get closer to him? Will DNA testing throw up some kind of shock, something that I hadn’t known, something I didn’t want to know? Would it change me?

I am interested in the blending of body and archive that is now happening on Ancestry. In my work I look at the way that the human body is becoming part of historical investigation, and providing evidence for family historians. How does DNA data change our way of understanding the past? We generally understand DNA through popular scientific versions of genetics, or through paternity tests undertaken on the Jeremy Kyle show. It is a promise of revelation – good and bad. This was shown powerfully recently when White Supremacist Craig Cobb discovered on live television that he was 14% African American.

Yet I guess the point is that the DNA information lies there whether we access it or not, whether we leave it dormant or begin to start looking at it. It offers a new way of understanding the huge, terrifying thing that is the past.

 

After

The process of collecting DNA does not feel like ‘research’ – spitting in a tube, shaking it about. I’ve just done some exercise so I have hardly any saliva. I actually forget about the whole thing until an email pings into my inbox suddenly. I am scared to open it….

Have I changed?

My ethnicity is pretty much what I had expected, and it is very solidly European. I’m 40% from Great Britain, 28% from West Europe and 15% from Ireland. This is all kind of predictable for me – I have maternal great-grandparents from Ireland, and my Opa, as I’ve said, was from the Netherlands. The test confirmed what I knew from my own research into my family conducted along more traditional – archival, textual – lines. It confirms that I am incredibly European, and I’m not too surprised. My 6% Italian DNA allows me to follow, for instance, my maternal great-great grandfather, the Merchant Seaman from Genoa, through my physical physiology and also my archival family tree. I have a sense of the past as something found in documents but also residing in my innermost cells.

I have, though, got little bits of other things that I can’t identify as easily. 6% is from Finland/ Northwest Russia. 3% is from the Iberian Peninsula, and a final 1% is from Scandinavia. These are more problematic to find in the physical archive, and perhaps they are multiple generations ago. I like the fact that it is such a mix, and that there are these strange little bits of me that come from all over the edges of Europe.

In some ways it demonstrates powerfully how, in a contemporary world of great mobility, migration and displacement, many of our ancestors did not move or travel a great deal outside of Europe.

The DNA data confirms my sense of my self in some way. In terms of new family, I have some interesting connections. My nearest DNA matches is a 4^th cousin. That Italian great-great grandfather is the link between us. I find it amazing and strange that there is someone living who shares some of their basic cellular information with mine. It doesn’t change my sense of my family but it alters my sense of singularity somehow. It opens up a new sense of things. These DNA matches – to 4^th, 5^th, and even 6^th cousins – can be very useful in making research breakthroughs.

You can follow Dr. Jerome de Groot on Twitter @deggy21