British.
BUT NOT ENGLISH!!??
Kinda.
I went with AncestryDNA, mostly for health reasons. My mum and dad both have rather concerning, hereditary heart conditions, and I myself was born with some kind of hole in my heart which I assume has filled up since.
So I figured I could learn more myself instead of some private hospital crap, and I can get some of my actual ancestry info at the same time.
Well, in my recent trip to England I got the kit delivered, spat in a tube, sent it off, and a while later I got my results.
When you do these tests, you really only get the location results and some random traits like how likely you will go bald (likely nonssense). But, I learnt you can download the raw genetic data into a text file and upload that in other places for more intel.
But, starting with the Ancestry data:
A Very Dull Story
My whole DNA journey has harboured no shocks, particularly. But it has been fascinating nonetheless. My entire bloodline seemed at first to be mostly in the middle of England, where I myself grew up.
So, my entire bloodline pretty much never moved.
The one strange outlier here is 2% Icelandic. At first, I thought this was probably just background noise, as these sites are really only estimates, so I left it alone. Until it popped up again. More on that later.
In the last 300 years, the story is even less varied, literally lingering around Leicester, the town I was raised in.
But I decided to dig a little deeper using some other platforms, and that's where I found some minor surprises:
Now, most Brits are some kind of blend of Celtic, A little Anglo Saxon, maybe a sprinkling of viking and some others. But I found a lot of my Celtic ancestry to originate not from England, but from Ireland.
In fact, around 14-16%.
I asked my mum what she knew about this, and it turns out that her grandmother was in fact Irish! Making my mother a quarter Irish, and myself approximately 12.5%. These shuffle around a bit over the generations so that's an average. The deepest dive I went to summed up about 14.6%, which checks out.
My literal ancestors
There's even a service which can find your genetic distance from ancient folk who have been dug up over the years and their DNA extracted. A few thousand have been discovered going as far back as 4,000 years or so.
Of course, this doesn't mean they're a great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparent of mine, but simply, they are the closest known ancient individual who shares some of my DNA structure.
Plotted in a PCA chart, you get this:
As you can see, a Briton in Yorkshire seems to be closest to me from the library of corpses here. There's some vikings behind that tab, too.
But I needed more!
The above is from MyTrueAncestry. But another service provided me with a greater wealth of corpses, for a small fee, called Genomelink.
Here, I found four individuals whose genetic distance from me was particularly small, given the vast timescale:
- A Medieval Key Holder
- Swordsman
- Farmer
All from Ely. And:
- A Yeoman Norwegian residing in Orkney Island, Scotland.
Interestingly, My mum to this day lives around Ely. So that's a confirmed 1,000 years of immobile bloodline.
Their bodies told stories through their burial sites, some mixed with foreign norsemen or Anglo Saxons, others in homogenous areas. Some buries in mixed graveyards, others separated. All of them had some kind of artefact buried alongside them, giving away their social status in the world.
The swordsman of course had a sword and shield among other battle gear. The Key Holder was a female with seemingly high status; the key was left with her, one to be kept by a responsible individual to take care of treasure and such. She had lovely brooches and other high status gifts buried alongside her and her family.
There were hundreds more fairly close corpses, but I don't have all day.
One more individual grabbed my attention in particular.
The Icelandic Murderer
Suddenly, the 2% Iceland connection fit in place.
In short, this man wanted to bone a farmer's wife, and with her urging him to do the unthinkable, he murdered the husband farmer - Saemundur Thorarinsson - and got with the wife successfully.
They were caught, convicted, and both sentenced to death in 1704.
He was beheaded, and his head put on a pike as a warning to others! in 1988, people found his body buried togeher with the housewife Steinunn Gudmundsdottir, but his head was buried separately elsewhere. Steinunn was drowned.
They were, amazingly, the last ever executions by Iceland's Kopavogs Parliament.
I am very, VERY curious as to how his DNA trickled down to me. But this is as far as I could get.
So... my health?
Yet another resource, Promethease, does a really reliable job at checking your genetic disposition to certain things, good and bad. Again they're only estimates but people have consistently found their known conditions to be confirmed this way.
It turns out, as feared, I have multiple genes raising my risk of heart disease, as well as a higher risk of prostate cancer.
On the bright side, I'm less likely to go bald than most people, and grey early (I'm already middle aged so I'm totally fine to go grey now).
My muscles are more developed for strength than endurance, and I absorb Iron a little too efficiently so I know to avoid taking supplements in this area. I absorb Vitamin A less efficiently.
I also have genes for particularly thick hair, which tracks given both my mum and I would get sick of hairdressers complaining about how thick our manes always were.
In Conclusion
I guess I'm pretty Irish! Certainly more Celt than average and less Anglo-Saxon (barely 10%). There's as much Scottish Gael in me too.
I have some confirmed health things I can mention to a doctor one day to keep in mind.
I have some awesome, and yet also dull, ancestors out there.
And I have no weird surprises like I'm 1/64th Japanese or whatever. I'm just... a middle-of-England, Irish Celt. (Also quite a bit of Scottish Gael)
With a propensity to murder people who get in my way. Maybe.
