With German ancestry, there’s a reasonable chance you have some Jewish ancestors, so don’t rule that out. You might even be related to Bryant Gumble! 
His (white) German ancestor (I think G-G-Grandfather) was a Jewish German, which is where his last name comes from.
That is not uncommon, and is a reasonable explanation tying the family story with the DNA data.
As I had expected, I’m 96% boring old Western European. The other 4% is a smidge of Finnish and Iberean.
I had hoped to be surprised by some exotic ancestry, but I’m just a plain-old translucent chick. My peeps have been in the U.S. since the 1600s, which I already knew due to our Mormon zest for geneaological research.
Yeah, Jewish ancestry can pop up often. I don’t know how exactly they pinpoint it to “Jewish”, but I guess they cross-referenced enough DNA to get a rough idea of the genome markers. My girlfriend and I both got our tests. When hers came back, in addition to Chinese and small amounts of Japanese, Mongolian, and Southeast Asian, we were surprised to find a very small percentage of Ashkenazi Jewish. “What the hell?”, we thought.
But it turns out she has ancestors from Macau. Read a little about Robert Hotung aka Bosman and other Jews and Dutch who were influential in Macau and Hong Kong, and it starts to make more sense.
Also, I was for sure I had at least a tiny bit of Sub-Saharan ancestry, since the guy in this extremely badass picture is a blood relative of mine - my paternal great grandfather’s brother. But none was found. Also, in pictures of that guy in middle age and older, he didn’t look like that anymore. Maybe it’s just the lighting.
The picture is from WWI.
Another, somewhat unlikely but possible, explanation is that your g-g-grandfather WAS Jewish, but was either a convert himself or the descendant of a recent convert(s). A convert may not be ethnically Jewish, but in the eyes of other Jews he is still fully Jewish.
We have some of the flip side of the “my g-g-grandfather was Jewish” on my dad’s side, but it goes " g-g-grandmother was Russian Orthodox" or Catholic, for the branch that used to live in Warsaw when it was a Grand Duchy of Russia. All oral tradition, the written records were destroyed in WWII, and frankly I have my doubts about some of the accuracy of all that, but there were marriages (and sometimes rape, which is another possibility, along with adoption) back and forth across ethnic and religious lines as you go back in history, and quite a bit of it was covered up or only spoken about in hushed tones.
Another is that he was of some ancestry considered undesirable and let on that he was Jewish even when he was not if he thought would make him more socially acceptable (as a completely random arse-pull - maybe he thought be Jewish would be better than being Gypsy). Rather like how so many Americans who were told they had Native ancestry are now finding that was a cover for having African ancestry, like in iiandyiiii’s post.
So… while genes tell a great deal of the story of your past they aren’t the whole of the story.
There’s a good movie called The Human Stain, where Anthony Hopkin’s character pretends to be part Jewish to cover for the fact that he’s actually part African-American. In the world of academia in the mid-20th century, this probably would have been necessary in order to be granted higher academic status.
Um… nope. Technically, I was born west of the Mississippi and spent my first 6 years (minus 9 months in West Virigina) living there. No Native ancestry, my pedigree in the New World is well attested and documented.
But… given that we know we have some sort of East Asian in our background it would not surprise me if one of those tests claimed I had some Native genes, but if so, it would be to common ancestors in Asia and not the Americas.
I’ve never been tested but would be astonished to find that I was other than 100% Ashkenazy. But what would I do with the information? Someone has created an insanely large database of my mother’s family, while my father never talked about his. But my ancestors all arrived between 1885 and 1904.
The “family legend” is that my great-grandfather was full-blooded Cherokee, making my sister and me 1/8. 23andme says… not a drop. Heh.
My story, too. Not a drop. But somewhere we have less than one percent Ashkenazi Jew.
Yeah most Americans who say they are part Native, are just misinformed. Elizabeth Warren is one notable example of someone who has attracted a lot of public attention for such claims, even though I’m quite sure that if she were to take a DNA test, the proportion of Native ancestry would be nonexistent. However, someone’s looks (phenotype) aren’t necessarily part of it. There are enrolled members of registered tribal bands who look predominantly European, or black (African-Americans joined numerous tribes, if I’m not mistaken.) Saying stuff like “he doesn’t look like an Indian” is missing the point…it’s not the looks that matter, it’s the tribal affiliation. They take this stuff very seriously. These tribes have documented history going back hundreds and hundreds of years, they’re not a fan of people trying to add insult to the injury of their historical mistreatment, by retroactively claiming to be part of their culture.
95% northern European. ~60% English and Irish. However, I’m thinking that English and Irish is probably incomplete. I know I’ve got Welsh blood via maternal great grandfather, never heard of Irish, and probably the test doesn’t differentiate the Welsh. Around 3% Iberian and Italian.
Surprised no jewish blood in the woodpile, and like many thought there might have been a native Indian lurking somewhere.
I’ve read somewhere that once you get to a few percent, it’s pretty inaccurate.
My wife tested as 100% Han Chinese. The mongols never made it to her ancestral village.
!!
I’m shocked.
100% Scandinavian dad and 100% Japanese mother resulted in…
[SPOILER]
(wait for it…)
[SPOILER]49.9% of each.
I was SURE there’d be some surprise! Pirates, gypsies, slaves, surfers!
I mean, why couldn’t there be a galleon full of pirates who …umm, “had their way with a wench or two” while pillaging, or a Romani caravan passing through Trondheim on the way to IKEA, or a truly gnarly surfer dude catching The Most Righteous Wave near Tokyo…
Darn.
[/SPOILER][/SPOILER]
Determining if you have NA ancestry is tricky if you can’t show a clear lineage (and even then you have to go by Maternal Lines because, well: rape, early marriage while pregnant by someone else and also 'No Father listed".)
And even with a clear Lineage “Given this chart, if the Native percentage is back beyond 6 generations and drops below the 1% threshold, it’s extremely difficult to discern today.” Proving Native American Ancestry Using DNA | DNAeXplained – Genetic Genealogy Which means 1 ggggg-parent was 100% NA… you might have none of their DNA. (I think I put the right amount of Gs.)
There’s also the fact that many of us NA won’t get tested because any results might be used against us due to the Blood Quantum rule. Suddenly one might not be a member of a Band or Tribe even though their great grand-parent had been “adopted” into the tribe/band and their kids were considered 100% part of the band/tribe but nowadays being a member= $$. My Band changed the Quantum in the 70s by which time I had been born but had not been registered (makes me feel a bit like a dog) but since my 6 elder siblings had been and are members both my little sister and me were admitted. None of us have our kids in the band once they turned 18 (became adults) since we live a state away and did not marry cousins.
So some stories of “(great) great-grandma/pa was part whatever” might be true. And if it helps you vote for NA stuff or makes you feel a bit of empathy… I, for one, won’t ask you to name your forbears. Well, as long as you weren’t trying for a scholarship, college position or political position due to actually being NA. We’re still trying to climb up in Society. Pretenders don’t help us.
And then there are folks like my in-laws who hid their Native heritage - there are photos, names, census records, various documents in both English and Cherokee, my mother-in-law and her brother actually spoke Cherokee well enough to have conversations in it… yet for the most part they’d deny their Native ancestry. Well, maybe not entirely a mystery given that they were related to the Eastern Band Cherokee who escaped the Trail of Tears and managed to remain in the area by hiding.
Funny - all those non-Natives claiming an “Indian princess” in their family tree, and then you have a family that is denying they’re Native despite actual proof existing…
Sort of like how sometimes the guy bragging about being on Seal Team Six or some super-secret commando group in the military and veteran of all sorts of super-secret missions often turns out to have been a file clerk while in the service, and the real Super Soldier/Medal of Honor types typically don’t talk about it or advertise their past service.
It can narrow down to Japanese? As in distinguish Japanese from Korean, for example?
Turkey isn’t exactly a universe away from Greece.
My mytochondrias turned out to be Mediterranean. Yeeeeah, not what anybody would call a surprise… AFAIK, they’ve been in Asturias thereabouts of “forever” before moving from there to Barcelona and from Barcelona to Navarre. Not particularly travel-y, that female line.
I’m not sure why you would think that. You might be closer to the truth if you said “Everyone whose family has lived west of the Mississippi for 5 generations or so…”. And keep in mind that most people living in that part of the country don’t have deep familial roots in the region, so unless they absorb NA ancestry by osmosis, one wouldn’t expect to find any simply because of where they live today.
The one major exception would be people of Hispanic ethnicity, and there are a lot of Hispanics in the west. But then they probably do have deep ancestral roots in the area (or south of that area).
Nitpick: “mitochondria” is the plural form already, so no “s.” Mitochondrion is the singular.
I was being sarcastic. I should have written, “Every family West of the Mississippi claims a Cherokee princess ancestor.” There was supposedly an Indian relative on both sides of the family named “John Smith”, disproven by DNA. Go figure.