Things Are Not Always What They Seem

What do you say when someone asks you what your ancestry is?

With me, it has never been a problem. “I’m German,” I always say with a big smile. “Kannst du sagen?”

I love it when someone asks, because everyone thinks that the last name “O’Daffer” has to be Irish—and I get to surprise them.

And, of course, I follow up by telling them that my name was originally “Odoerfer,” pretty obviously a German name.

“Somebody just poked an apostrophe in there to make it appear more classy,” I say.

Then, if they aren’t too glassy eyed already, I tell about my ancestor link to Germany, Johann Wolfgang Odoerfer, who was my great- great-great grandfather. He came to America as a Hessian soldier, and defected to fight with the Colonists in the Revolutionary War.

I also tell them, “He stayed in America to marry a Pennsylvania woman, and because of them, here am I.”

All of this sounds well and good, but, surprisingly–as I have recently found out—it is not an accurate picture of my true ancestry!

Taking The DNA Leap

About 8 weeks ago, I saw that you could get a DNA kit from Ancestry.com, spit in a vial, send it back, and after a while get an Ethnicity Report from them telling you what nationalities were in your DNA.

Since I like a bargain as much as anybody, and the reduced price was $79, I ordered the kit, and put the wheels in motion.

Sure enough, in about 5 weeks, my Ethnicity Report popped up on my Ancestry.com website, and you could have blown me over with a feather.

It’s All in The DNA

There it was. While my DNA showed a significant part of my ethnicity was German (30%), the major part was English/Scottish (49%)!

And, much to my pleasure, there was a little bit of Ireland in there too (11%).

So, lo and behold, and contrary to what I’ve been telling everyone, I am 70% non-German!

What I had failed to take into consideration in my “I’m German” past was that when you are born you get 50% of your DNA randomly from your father, and 50% of your DNA randomly from your mother.

So I must have gotten a pretty heavy portion of my mother’s British/Scottish DNA, and a lighter portion of my father’s German DNA.

I knew that while my great-great grandfather William Gray on my mothers side lived in Ballyjamesduff, in County Caven, Ireland before he came to America, “Gray” is not thought of as an Irish name.

Now I find out that the people named Gray came from the noble Boernician clans that lived in the Scottish-English border regions, and that many of these people later moved to Ireland.

If I had not been so hung up on the male side of my family, I might have came a little closer to my true ethnic origins, earlier in my life.

 So What’s The Moral Of The Story?

Well, maybe the upshot of all of this is that determining the nationalities of your ancestors is a difficult process, and, if we aren’t careful, we can be easily fooled by our genealogy research.

Even determining one’s ethnicity from a DNA sample isn’t an exact science, and often involves an estimate based on the average of an analysis of a large number of samples of your DNA.

But if you want to get a little closer to your correct ethnicity, find out about others who have the same ancestral DNA as you, and have some fun along with it, shell out $79 (without discount, $99) to Ancestry.com, and send them some spit.