re: Genealogy & Ancestry

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I see a lot of people getting some small percent of African dna on their results but when I did a 23&me I got 0% sub Saharan African

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My wife came back 3% Nigerian/Congo. She also got a pretty good bit of Belgian. So knowing what we do about history, her Belgian ancestors must have come down with a little case of jungle fever when they were pillaging the Congo. Either way, I’m trying to figure out how to get her signed up to receive reparations.

I use Ancestry to put in all the information I find and to store my tree. It has also helped me find a bunch of information and connect with distant cousins to confirm info, etc.

However you will still need to do your own research as a lot of times, especially on Ancestry, you will get wrong information from time to time, especially if you depend on trusting information from others trees.

It is a never ending project IMO and I'm always finding new sources of info, etc. I've gone through libraries, various genealogy sites, church records, family records etc to pull my info.

If you have any kind of French or German Ancestry, I highly recommend Geneanet. I found all kind of cool information for my surname there including actual marriage certs for my 5th, 6th, and 7th great grandfathers in the Alsace-Lorraine region. It was pretty cool to see their actual signatures on the documents that have been stored in French archival records.

I've gone back pretty far on the major branches of my family tree. In some cases I've made it back to the early 1000's, especially in England due to the Norman invasion in 1066 and the records that William the Conqueror had them create in the "Domesday Book".

The Library of Congress website is also very helpful, they have an entire archive of most of the newspapers in the USA from the mid 1700's until today. I used the names of my relatives and what I knew about them to find them in local newspapers and found all kinds of stuff, such as police jury records, court stuff, transfers of property, business interests, etc..

Nope.

I've had a past and don't want a phone call from some middle aged man or woman calling and saying, "Hello, Dad?"

A DNA test might cause more crap than I'm willing to stir. That may sound selfish, but let those surprises arise after I'm dead and gone.

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I got 3% Sub Saharan African (Mali) and luckily it's all in one place. My wife is happy.

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The move is to sign up for ancestry for a month, when you know you’ll have free time, and then cancel it when you are done and have researched enough. You can go back and look at it. And then a year or 2 down the line you can do the same and add more.

The last big wave of German immigrants came in the mid 19th century. So it is possible they married other white people and are no longer very German other than the last name.

The other alternative is that they were never even German. My father thought our last name was ”sounded German”. He is 100% British. The last name is British. I think he just assumed it because the city we live in is dominated by Germans

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It told her she was 90% Italian and 9% African. She badmouth Ancestry about how wrong it is for a year saying she is 100% Italian/Sicilian. She eventually did 23&Me to try and prove herself. And of course it said she was 9% African.

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She didn't see True Romance did she?

iykyk

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Be careful with FamilySearch. It's a useful tool, but it's community-researched data, so there are a LOT of errors.

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Also a sidenote that Family Search is operated by the Mormon (LDS) Church. That can concern some people, but if not they are very helpful.

When my father retired he decided to dig into the family ancestry because there were significant gaps. He actually did an in-person Zoom meeting with them and they went about digging up all sorts of public records for him without charge.

Long way of saying be aware of who you are engaging with and if you are comfortable with that organization having your family data.

And Sicily is even closer! Most “Italians” that came to America are in fact Sicilians. They are not genetically the exact same thing. Kind of like Spanish vs canary islanders.