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The Joy Of DNA Testing
One of the lessons I’ve learnt from your informative articles on DNA testing is that small percentages in ethnicity estimates can be misleading. I was therefore quite sceptical when my wife’s test results from Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk) informed her that she had 4 per cent “Indigenous American” DNA. Nevertheless, this result was so intriguing that further research was needed. Only one of my wife’s grandparents – her maternal grandmother, Ardell – had been born in the USA, so any Native American ancestry must have come via her. Ardell was still alive, at the age of 98, so we arranged for her to test too.
We discovered that 17 per cent of her DNA was Native American, indicating that one of her great grandparents, or possibly even a grandparent, was a Native American. The ancestry of three of Ardell’s grandparents was well researched, but some mystery surrounded her maternal grandfather, Joseph DeMars (1856–1914), who was believed to be a French Canadian. After consulting US census returns, I discovered that his father Louis was born in Quebec, and his mother was from Wyoming.
A Google search for Louis took me to a 19th-century journal which revealed that he had been a member of a group of fur trappers who emigrated from Quebec to Wyoming in the 1850s, where almost all of them had married women from the Native American Shoshone tribe in the Green River area. Louis went on to be an interpreter for the US Army in their negotiations with the Shoshones.
So, we know my wife’s 3x great grandmother was Shoshone, although we still don’t know her name.
If anyone is considering taking one of these DNA tests, I would thoroughly recommend it. You never know what you might find!
Jeremy Schuman, Buckinghamshire
EDITOR REPLIES What an amazing discovery Jeremy. It reminds me of Kevin Clifton’s episode, which I highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen it. Perhaps another relation can use the test kit that Ancestry will send you as your Star Letter prize, and lead you to another surprise!
EARLY ANTIBIOTICS IN THE MAIL
I have always found newspaper articles invaluable for researching my ancestors. Over the years they have revealed everything from obituaries to properties that they owned and details of heroic and even criminal behaviour.
There are several websites providing historic newspaper articles, and I dip in and out of them. On a whim I signed up for a free seven-day trial to access some articles
