When I was growing up, my mother hinted that we had a family secret, and her eyes would light up with delight. Sometimes she hinted that we might be part native American on her father’s side, and I thought this could be the secret. My known ethnic origins are Danish on my father’s side (he was born in Denmark, had a sea-faring career that brought him to the U.S.), and on my mother’s side, English and Irish. Because of the unexpected twists and turns of life, my mother somehow never got around to telling me her father’s family secret.
Just lately I’ve really been wanting to know, but now there is no one to ask. So I began doing standard genealogical research in the hope of finding something. However, there are many ways to cover one’s tracks on the paper trail when a ‘secret’ is involved. I enjoyed that process but did not uncover anything that could be interpreted as a ‘secret.’ In terms of written documents, I’ve so far traced our family back as far as 1710. From my reading about the early Colonial period, I’ve deduced that if the secret in our family was an inter-marriage between people from different continents it would have happened back then.
One day it occurred to me that a DNA test might give me at least some hints about any unknown family ancestry that would have been kept as a ‘secret.’ I might at least be able to contextualize things. I had no idea whether I was correct, but I went on line and did a search. Soon I was turning up sites that offered DNA tests to determine ancestry. I soon found out that since the information I’m seeking is about my mother’s father’s family, the mtDNA and Y-DNA tests would not show me anything, so I decided to opt for the autosomal DNA test which gives a fuller palette of ancestry from all direct ancestors going back several generations. I chose DNA Tribes, because their website is very user-friendly, their graphs and FAQ were articulate and complete. I felt they made an effort to help clients interpret their results. My results were not anything that I was expecting.
I scored a very high probability of having primarily Turkish ancestry, which was a complete surprise. I also had an awful lot of Polish! I did not score high on any of the Native American indices, but had enough sub-Saharan African ancestry to make that non-European influence interesting. I had to go back to the drawing board. I thought about it: the Danes at one time had an empire around the Baltic Ocean, including parts of Poland. When I visited Denmark in 1968, my relatives had a young Russian man living with them as a boarder, and I found out that Denmark and Russia have a long history of interrelationship. Since then I’ve found out that many Poles, Russians, and Finns, seeking employment, have emigrated to Denmark. So the presence of very high levels of Polish-matched genes in my own genetic fingerprint makes sense. My mother’s family were long-time residents of southeast Pennsylvania, with documentation in Philadelphia, Bucks and Carbon Counties. They were laborers, and the original ancestor most likely came over as an indentured servant. Such persons often paid their passage to the new world by promising to serve as a slave for a certain number of years, usually four or seven. In the genealogical records there are several persons bearing our surname who came to the new world in just this way.
In the Colonial period, there was a great deal of intermarriage among indentured servants, which would have included Africans. In those days (the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) Africans brought to the Americas generally served a term of years in slavery and were manumitted at the end of that period in the same manner as Europe’s indentured servants. By 1723, Pennsylvania passed a law forbidding marriage between black and white persons. However my ancestors seem clearly to have been living here before then, so there is indeed a fair probability that one of my early Colonial ancestors may have married an African or someone who was part-African.
Intermarriage among those of the indentured servant class and native Americans was also very common, so our family tradition of being ‘part-native-American’ may also be true, although I still lack any direct evidence of that at present. When I look at my results as a whole, I see a sea-faring picture. The Turks were great seafarers, and got all around the Mediterranean and up the west coast of Europe. My DNA results show ancestry in all these areas: Yugoslavia, Italy, North Africa, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium, Denmark. All accessible by sea, all accessible to Turkish sailors. Even in the New World Turks were among the first sailors. The earliest unsuccessful colony in Virginia was made by a Spaniard and his Turkish sailors in 1526. So, the Turks got around, and this high percentage of Turkish-matching genetic material in my DNA fingerprint affirms my family’s sea-faring tradition. There are very ‘old Americans’ who claim an origin around 1600 among Turkish sailors, native Americans, other Europeans, and early blacks.
My autosomal DNA test doesn’t ‘prove’ anything or give me any additional genealogical information, but it has helped me to contextualize my genealogical search, gives me more direction, and nuances my expectations as to what I will eventually find. I feel satisfied that this test has helped me to know more about myself than I otherwise would, and I appreciate that help very much.