Finding out about ancestry, royal blood, etc.

[MrMan]

My parents both did DNA tests, and we were surprised that neither of them had any Indian DNA show up in the test. That doesn't mean they don't have any Indian (Native American) ancestors, but my dad had three tribes he was supposed to be descended from, and my mom's grandmother was supposed to be full or half. My dad heard a name of a supposed Indian ancestor.

So I got on geni.com and started looking things up. I have not found any native American ancestors. I did find out that the American proginetors of my mother's maiden name and my father's name were neighbors in colonial Virginia. Actually the second and third generation of my father's immigrant ancestor were neighbors of my mother's ancestor, and he was buried on their estate for some reason. My father's immigrant ancestor's great granddaughter married the second generation of my mother's family, but that was maybe 6 or 8 generations back. It's interesting to see how ancestors on one side of the family died close where I used to live in my mother's family's part of the country, a very rural area, not the state where my dad is from.

One family name on my dad's side, my grandmother's, we thought was Irish, but it turns out it leads back to someone in the Hessian army during the revolution. My aunt had said we had ancestors on both sides of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. I haven't found the ancestor who came over on the Mayflower. She said we had one.

I was also curious about whether there were any famous or royal ancestors. I found an ancestor who was mentioned in a letter from Quaker founder George Fox. I have also found ancestors on both parents sides who were descended from royalty. On my mother's side, there was King Philip I of France and another line that led to Hugh Capet... and Vladimir the Great in Russia through another line of her family.

On my dad's side, I found a line of the family that had a knight and some ancestry descended from Dukes and Counts from European principalities that I had never heard of. Eventually, I saw I was descended from Charlemagne. I think he's my 38th great-grandfather.

I was clicking on one lineage-- I think my mom's-- and it showed me descended from a king of England, Fulk V up through Baldwin II of Jerusalem. (Who doesn't want to be descended from a guy named Fulk? They should name a university after him.)
I couldn't see how I'd clicked and gotten there, though, and I was concerned I might have clicked on a step father, a husband of a remarried widow. I'm also descended from at least one king of Germany and kings of Scotland.

Mostly, DNA-wise I'm English and British isles, based on their genetic tests. My dad is a bit swarthy, and I thought that was from Native blood, but his DNA comes out as pure white and didn't show Iberian or Italian. I did see a Galician monarch or nobleman looking up the royal lineage, but royals may be more related to other royals than to the local populace, and that may have been a more Celtic part of Spain 100 years ago.

A Bavarian German I know had a test that showed him as heavily 'Sythian' and part 'Visigoth.' I don't know how they ran that test. They'd have to have used bones. Visigoths are way later than Sythians.

It's actually statistically very likely to be descended from royalty. They intermarried with nobles who intermarried with commoners. But us commoners do not always keep track of our family lines. I was primarily using geni.com. Most lines deadend pretty soon, sometimes as far back as the 1400s if it's commoners. The ones that do not tend to go into nobility and royalty. Historians keep track of their lineages and they probably did, too, so those get filled in.

If you do a DNA test, 23andMe was more 'fun' than ancestry.com, I think. The former showed the counties of Ireland and areas of England, London, and Germany where my mom had ancestry. My dad did the ancestry,com test. It's output is more vague.