My last few posts have been pretty heavy, so I thought I would do something a little more lighthearted.

There are a variety of different services that offer DNA testing to find out your ethnicity. Last year, there was a sale on testing from one of the companies, so I decided to give it a go. I was curious about my background because I didn’t know much about my father, since my parents divorced when I was 6 years old and I haven’t seen him since then. I was told that my father was Sicilian, and my mother said her mother was Romanian, and her father was Hungarian. That would then mean I’m Sicilian, Romanian, and Hungarian. My husband wanted to take the test as well, even though he knew he was of Russian and Scottish Jewish ethnicity.

When I received my DNA results, I was shocked. The testing service I used shows results by region, and the more people from a region that do the test, the more specific information that will be available, such as country, and/or regions/communities within a country. Here is how my results broke down:

My husband’s results came in, and we both laughed really hard for way too long. His said 99.1% Jewish, with the countries of Russia and Scottland highlighted.

I saw online a couple of other services you could upload your DNA file to and they would be analyized. I thought I would give one of them a try to see if anything different showed up. The results, shown below, were interesting.

If I had to guess, most of the new ethnicities that were revealed probably came from my father’s side of the family, though perhaps some of it came from my mother’s father, as she did not know anything about him because he had left when she was 4 years old. I was able to see the immigration papers from my grandmother and great-grandparents; they were from Romania. There is a likelihood that some of the different ethnicities, especially the ones near Romania are from my ancestors on my mother’s side. Whatever the case is, it’s interesting information to discover.