Thanks to the anthro department when I was back at university I got 23andMe for free! It used to just be able to tell you your haplogroup in terms of ancestry but they’ve come a long way and I always found genealogy super fun and interesting :>

Obviously there’s overlapping (otherwise the percentages would be perfect) but the results actually divide pretty cleanly between my grandparents. Let’s explore woo-!

British and Irish: both of my father’s parents are purebred yankees. Not like the sportsball people, no—“yankee” is actually an ethnic term referring to the decendents of English colonists, particularly those from New England. Both family lines kept birth records going back hundreds of years so we got good documented proof that it’s English all the way down for my paternal grandfather, English and Scottish by way of Canada for grandmother. Some of the Franco-Germanic heritage is likely from them too via Anglo-Saxon colonization of the British Isles.

French and German: My mother’s mother (feels weird calling her my grandmother since she died long before I was born) was Pennsylvania Dutch. “Dutch” is a misnomer and actually comes from “Deutch”—the German word for German. According to her family’s records her ancestors moved around all over the German states with some contributions from Hungary and Italy.

Scandinavian: My maternal grandfather immigrated from Denmark and his family records document that his ancestors have lived in Denmark and neighboring Norway for generations. However, because of the migratory seafaring lifestyle Scandinavians took part in for hundreds of years its unsurprising that genetic heritage would become hazy overtime as people from other areas join Scandinavian family groups. Though only a small percent of our family’s genetic make up can be directly traced to Danish ancestors, my “broadly Northwestern European” ancestry is likely a mix of other North Sea-bordered groups (Flemish, Franco-Germanic, Breton, etc) and Scandinavian.