back to Family Stories, Fall 2021

by Claire Andersen

I was fortunate enough to go back 10 generations and find my German ancestor. However, in my ethnicity report, I had zero DNA that was German. I thought to myself: How could this happen? It was very surprising to find out that my strongest family line on AncestryDNA was from Germany, yet it resulted in me having no German DNA. Especially, considering that ThruLines confirms I shared DNA segments with my family members. Turns out, it is possible for DNA to wash out over time. While my DNA doesn’t truly “wash out” in a literal sense, the DNA passed down by our ancestors was diluted with the DNA from my other ancestors. Meaning, that my genetic material from distant ancestors is “watered-down” over time, therefore it didn’t show up as intensely in my DNA results as DNA from our recent ancestors. 

Considering my ancestor who immigrated to Wisconsin was my 3 great-grandparents, Oswald Herman and Maria Theresia Meyer. I can assume my German DNA was washed out and I inherited a small amount that was too little to show up in my ethnicity report. Reviewing that I have earlier generations of ancestors coming from different regions such as Italy, Ireland, the UK, and Norway. It makes sense that this DNA takes up a large portion of my ethnicity. 

In class, we learned that every child inherits 50% of their DNA from their mother and 50% of their DNA from their father. The DNA passed down from their parents is in the form of each of their twenty-two chromosomes from each parent and a sex chromosome from each parent. In other words, when I was born, I got a copy of Chromosome 1 from my mother and another copy from my father. This allowed me to recombine into my own unique chromosome. Because of this recombination process, which can be imagined as “mixing” two copies, there are mixes of DNA segments. I learned through using Ancestry Thrulines that I share 14 DNA matches with my fourth and fifth great grandparents, which is between 8 and 1,536 cM. However, to reiterate, this isn’t significant enough to see German descent being recognized in my Ancestry. This also makes sense that there is very little DNA considering how far back they are on my family tree. 

I am still currently getting Ancestry hints to continue down my German descent. Having conversations with my family, we all find this very intriguing. Since this is on my paternal side, my father is thinking about getting an AncestryDNA kit. Potentially, there is a chance that he could have German descent and it would be very interesting to compare the two. We are also interested in looking into where they lived in Wisconsin. My family and I lived very close to the Wisconsin border, and I’m currently looking into more information as to why they lived there.

Overall, I learned a lot from my genealogy course. It was very compelling to know what the components make you who you are, and it was fun discovering where my family came from.