What Should I Conclude from These DNA Tests?

Factual Questions
1

Ok, some background- My family is quite toxic. I am not in contact with them, and it’s not going to be safe to contact them to ask questions, regardless of how convenient that might be.

My family tree is quite well documented- I have some 2nd cousins who are genealogy buffs and have catalogued an amazing amount of primary source material. My mother’s family came to the United States in the 1600s from England. Several times in the last 400 years they have had half Irish folks marry in. Calculated out, it would be expected that I would be roughly 63-75% English, with the remainder Irish, although up to 2% may be Scandinavian, from one distant relative a number of generations ago with Scandinavian / English roots.

Now my father’s side. His side is entirely Italian. They came here in the early 1900s. We have scans of original ship logs, naturalization papers, and even one ancient Italian birth certificate. That family was not exactly well-traveled, and had lived in small Italian villages since ever. HOWEVER, my grandmother was adopted in the United States. She was believed to be Italian per nuns at orphanage, but really, who can say?

So DNA would expect to see 25% Italian, 25% WILD CARD (father’s side) and Mostly English, with some Irish on my mother’s side.

Ancestry DNA test occurs. Results show NO Italian heritage. I am 63% English, 17% Irish, and the rest is French, German, Iberian Peninsula, and South Asian (???). I have spent the last week going through all my tree, with no new findings. Ancestry DNA match system shows my mother’s side of the family (OF COURSE they have taken the test and put it in the system. They are geneology freaks and love this). BUUUT, I also have several hundred people in the range of 3rd-6th cousins, with very high confidence for whom I can find NO matches in paper family tree. There should be common great (4) grandparents. But, nothing. Names I do not recognize from other parts of the world originally. Some of them do have ties to the part of the US I was born in.

Given all this, should I conclude my father may not be genetically related to me? I know my mother had a hard time conceiving, in part because my father had a low sperm count and undescended testicle. However, it was the mid-1970s, so sperm donation wasn’t exactly a common thing. But, one can get all the sperm one wishes if they have 15 min to spare and a few drinks handy, if they are reasonably attractive. I have a brother, we also do not talk. We look nothing alike. Getting another test run by a different company to rule out human error, but given the correct connections to my mother’s side of the family (including correctly identifying relationships), I doubt this is the case.

What should I conclude from facts so far?

2

Take those cheap website connected DNA tests with several large grains of salt.

3

I’m not sure what to conclude, but your results are so unexpected that I’d be tempted to do the test again with the other company. IOW if you went with 23andme, then do a 2nd test with ancestry.com. Or the reverse. It’ll only cost you about a hundred bucks to possibly get a few more answers. Or a few more questions. That’s all I got.

4

Test 1 was ancestry, in order to connect with family tree.

Test 2 with be My Heritage. They seem to focus on this aspect of family lineage specifically, and the 23andMe focus on “health” is both creepy and overall not really useful/ very valid.

5

I read somewhere (sorry no cite) that careful DNA tests in England showed that about 10% of all people didn’t have the father they thought they had.

Just for the record, I would not have my DNA tested if it were free. Or if you paid me. Sometimes ignorance should not be fought.

6

It could just as easily be that your father’s father wasn’t who you think.

7

IIRC, it was supposed to be an old study on blood types where often the supposed father couldn’t be. But that might be a mythtake.

8

Do you really want to know? My cousin (moms sisters son) didn’t look like his brother or his dad. He didn’t stop going on and on about it. He finally got DNA testing. He and his brother are half brothers. Of course his mom and dad are deceased many years at this point. He had no where else to pursue his questioning, so he decides to research genealogy of the family. He convinces many of us, my 8 sibs and other cousins to do DNA testing. To the startling conclusion that he is really our (My sibs and me) brother. My Daddy was having a relationship with my Aunt (moms sister). We cannot question these peeps because they are all dead. Shoulda let that sleeping dog lie, IMHO.

9

Sperm donation was quite common in the mid 70’s. Every major city in the US had providers of that service.

10

Yes, I can’t find the article at present, but I have seen similar, although I recalled the percentage higher. Will google.

For the record, discovering my father was not my biological father would be surprising, but not distressing particularly, and might explain some…oddities… in family dynamics.

Plus, given that I had to cut ties with my family due to horrible homo & transphobia, this could be quite the good situation.

11

…as did many bars… There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one way to get oneself spunk on the cheap.

12

Yep, I do. I recognize I’ll probably never hear the story behind it. However, the Asian finding already was interesting, as my medical history (alcohol intolerance, amongst other things), has lead doctors to ask if I had Asian ancestry. I always said not to my knowledge. Apparently, my knowledge was faulty.

13

I didn’t see the 23andme health stuff as any particular focus-- it was just an option. I didn’t choose it and got only the ancestor information.

I sincerely hoped for some earth-shaking surprises in my DNA heritage, but sadly, it was very predictable. I would have loved to find out that one or both of my parents were not related to me. I was longing to have my world turned upside down. But, no.

14

One of my cousins was a founder/leader of what she terms “gene-eology” – using genetic testing to confirm or double-check “paper” results. Her opinion is that if you go back 5 generations you have about a 15% chance of one person or another being the result of — lets call it an aberration in lineage. Her thought 10 years back was that it doesn’t always show as a major blip since a lot of the “donor fathers” will be from the same basic background. But I don’t know if, with all the recent testing and all done, that her guess at percentages and results have been updated.

15

Me, too. Just to shake up the family that is left. Mom was the Keeper of Records, and traced her side of the family back to Scottish roots in the 1600s. I would truly love to find out that there were people from more southern climes in the family tree, rather than all Northern European with a sprinkling of Russian quite a ways back.

16

I’ve enjoyed my 23andMe experience tremendously. I’ve found DNA relatives whom have helped me take the lineage back farther, and wonder of wonders, discovered I’m 2.1% ashkenazi jew!!! Woo hoo!!

17

You seem really fixated on this one narrative. I think it’s vastly less likely than either a sanctioned sperm donation or a normal affair: trolling bars for DNA is a really disgusting and inefficient way to get pregnant. Trolling for sperm while trying to avoid anyone you know and possibly concealing it from your husband sounds awful.

18

I’m being sarcastic. Although affairs are often low cost as well.

I would rule out donation, knowing my family. Very Catholic and my dad would not go for it. It would be more likely for there to have been an affair or brief fling. Knowing my mother, it probably would have been quite brief and quite kept away from everyone/everything else in her life. he would have compartmentalized it and justified it to no end to herself.

19

I thought for years I was born in the wrong family. But, alas, no I am just as much a dipshit as the rest of them. You am what you am, I’m afraid.
There is that lingering wish that I was a long lost princess or duchess in the Romanovs clan. I need to dig in my Mom’s old junk for that missing Faberg’e egg. It could be, really it could!

20

I suggest you upload your DNA data to GEDmatch. It is free and it will give you another set of possible cousins as well as another admixture of ethnicities.

Based on my experience, you will get only slightly different results from each analysis. For example, one might have “British Isles” while the other one has “English” and “Irish.” And one might have a couple percent South Asian or Eastern Mediterranean while the other doesn’t. You also might find some previously unknown matches.

Regarding admixture, I would not pay much attention to anything <5% unless it shows up in more than one analysis. One analysis, but not the other, shows me as “<2% American Indian” despite the fact that none of my ancestors were in North America before the Civil War.

Also, while the big DNA companies seem to be on the up and up, I don’t think they do a good job helping you interpret results. I am pretty sure that if you took 100 “purely English” persons and analyzed their DNA, many would be 5%-20% Scandinavian and many would 5%-10% French or German (much higher in the case of the Royal Family). So when you see 2% Scandinavian that does not necessarily mean there was one purebred Scandinavian on holiday in England a number of generations ago. I could be that several of your English ancestors’ very distant ancestors had 5%-20% Scandinavian ancestry. Remember, you can get 25% from one grandparent who was 100% or from two grandparents who were 50% or from four great grandparents who were …

I have looked carefully through the “2nd-4th” cousin matches for myself and my wife and have never found any previously unknown relatives. These people do not necessarily share a recent ancestor. They could just as easily share multiple bits of DNA from multiple shared distant ancestors.

My impression, from what you have shared, is that it is possible that your father is not your ancestor. But, where in Italy is he from? What is his surname?. Not every family living for a long time in Italy is 100% Italian. More important, what does your Y-chromosome test show?

If I were you, I would get my Y-chromosome test to see whom I matched. This reflects exclusively the male line so there is a good chance it will give you a definitive result regarding your paternity. Second, I would upload my DNA findings to GEDmatch and then check GEDmatch for matches and admixture.