In the Fall last year I bought a kit from Ancestry.com that, using DNA collected from saliva, could be used to determine one's ethnicity. I planned to give it to Nancy for Christmas, which I did. But then, I thought, why not buy two and check out my ethnicity at the same time. So, after Christmas, we spit into a little tube and sent the samples off to AncestryDNA for analysis. We got the results this week. Mine first...

Apparently, I'm 100% European American. Knowing who my grandparents were, I probably could have drawn the colored areas on this map myself. My father's parents, Jacob Janosko and Maria Nemetz, immigrated (legally and separately) from Slovakia in 1900. They were married in 1902. My grandfather became a citizen in 1922 and was a coal miner for all of his working days. Just from that I would have made "Europe East" 50%, and I do see that the error bar does extend to 52%.

My mother's parents, Dick McCullough and Gwen Waring, are a little more difficult to pin down. The McCulloughs immigrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. Therefore I would expect to be somewhere around 25% Irish. My grandmother's family has been in the States since the middle of the 17th century. My niece, Anissa, tells me that I have a distant grandfather who was governor of Rhode Island in the 1680s. I'm assuming they all came from England, hence the Great Britain percentage.

So nothing unexpected in those data. I passed the information to my sister Barbara who I assume has the exact same ethnicity. Mom could be counted on to pretty much always tell the truth. Nancy's is more interesting. I'll post that next week.