Who Am I?

This first map shows from where my ancestors came!  I would have thought Great Britain would be the largest percentage, but it is only 11 percent.

 Here is a map of where the most of my genetics originated, Western Europe!  Germany and France. The Maples family was French.  Carpenters were German.  Gaddys were from Scotland.  We are not sure about the Powells. The name is Welsh, but it was a common name there at one time.  The Powells could be Irish, Scotish, German, Welsh.  We do not know.

Here are the amounts to each region.  So 70% is France and Germany, 14% Irish, 11% from Great Britain, and 5% from the trace regions, Iberian Peninsula and Scandinavia.

You can see my Irish roots here. It is more than just the Isle Erin!

 No African, No Asian, No Indian!  I read a book this week written by Margaret Jones Bolsterli.  She is an English Professor at the University of Arkansas.  When she did the DNA test at Ancestry, she found the above ethnicity.  What a shock!  At first, she told one of the "dark" cousin matches that there was a mistake.  But finally, she started to accept and search.  She looks at everything with a different perspective now.  Her Jones family were in Mississippi in 1870 labeled M, They moved across the State line 100 miles and in 1880 onward they are labeled W.  The book is really good.  It is about her quest to find her ancestors.  One should be ready to accept the results before doing the test!  Sometimes there are surprises.  Most folks have some African ancestors, but not the Three Sisters!

Here shows the Asian results--none!

 The way the DNA at Ancestry works is it finds cousin matches and will go back 8 generations.  When I got my results I had 420 some odd cousin matches, and now there are 467.  If the cousin does not have a family tree, it is hard to figure out how you match to them.  Without adding a tree, the test is not of much use.   The Three Sisters know a lot about our family tree and often we can follow the lead without a tree--about 25 percent of the time is my guess.  What we do is click the shared matches.  If one of the shared matches has a tree, it can be sorted out.  To do much with this DNA test, you have to be a problem solver and you have to like puzzles, plus without knowing a lot about your tree you can not figure out the matches.  Since we have been working on our tree nearly all our lives, it is a lot of fun for us!

Here are my top matches from the 467.  The first one is a great grandchild of Myrtle Powell Still.  Her daughter married a Brown.  She named a son Toby Brown.  This person is a daughter of Toby who lives in Colorado and only has 3 people listed in her tree, but I figured out who she was.  Find a Grave now is another big help.  That is how I found this with a clue from there.  It said she lived in Colorado.   Off I went working the puzzle.

The second one is from Lillie Coxsey who married Albert Davis!  Keven Thompson is a Great Grandson of Worthy Powell.  And the Stevens I think is from Lillie Coxsey too.  You can search for a surname in your matches.  For example, I could search for Gholson, Maples, Gaddy, Carpenter and it will show the ones with that surname.  I am looking forward to my next three tests that the Sisters have sent in:  Astrid, Walter Renfroe, and Joe Powell.  They have received Astrids and the other two have been activated.