Lawks - a Mercian!
Jul. 27th, 2018 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmWell, my DNA test results are in, and although they hold no radical surprises it's certainly very interesting to see my genes spread across the map like iron filings and clustering around certain magnetic poles.
I do find some of this hard to parse, though. It turns out I'm 37% from Great Britain, and especially from "Wales and the West Midlands", but a different 26% of me is from "Ireland/Scotland/Wales". So does that make doubly Welsh? Or Welsh in more than one way? I really can't say.
But the "Wales and West Midlands" sounds right: I have plenty of known ancestors both east and west of the border, although this of course is but the iceberg tip of the genetic story: the Butlers hail from Claines in Worcestershire, and my mother's family is scattered either side of the border in such places as Wellington, Wrexham, Ruthin and Chester.
As for the rest, I've more continental ancestry than I expected, considering that the nearest I've been able to trace is eight generations back and should thus account for less than 1% of my genes, but then I've not been able to follow every forking path, or anything like it.
Finland, Northwest Russia and the snowy Caucasus may account for less than 3% of the whole, but they provide a welcome note of exoticism in what is otherwise a predictably Western European story.
I do find some of this hard to parse, though. It turns out I'm 37% from Great Britain, and especially from "Wales and the West Midlands", but a different 26% of me is from "Ireland/Scotland/Wales". So does that make doubly Welsh? Or Welsh in more than one way? I really can't say.
But the "Wales and West Midlands" sounds right: I have plenty of known ancestors both east and west of the border, although this of course is but the iceberg tip of the genetic story: the Butlers hail from Claines in Worcestershire, and my mother's family is scattered either side of the border in such places as Wellington, Wrexham, Ruthin and Chester.
As for the rest, I've more continental ancestry than I expected, considering that the nearest I've been able to trace is eight generations back and should thus account for less than 1% of my genes, but then I've not been able to follow every forking path, or anything like it.
Finland, Northwest Russia and the snowy Caucasus may account for less than 3% of the whole, but they provide a welcome note of exoticism in what is otherwise a predictably Western European story.