holy cow. i sent a message to my nearest dna match. she is adopted.

[csziggy]

48. Yes, I agree. The only reason I'd like to know where I cam from is to understand

The stories behind the people from the past. The Native American trace has me intrigued since, other than some family rumors, there had been no hint before my sister and I had our DNA tests.

Oh - I got mine through Ancestry, my sister got hers through the National Geographic Genome Project, so that trace is not an aberration from one source.

What part of Western New York state? My ancestors settled in the area next to Lake Cayuga in the 1790s. One branch, that had originally settled New Amsterdam, moved to Albany just a bit later than that. At the time the first of my ancestors moved to the Finger Lake District, there was still a reservation for the Cayuga Indians in that area. The most recent immigrant on my father's side was his grandfather who arrived from Wales in 1872, worked in Pennsylvania in the coal mines then moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and sold cedar logs to the railroads and the mines.

On my mother's side, some of the people were among the first to buy land from William Penn in Pennsylvania - in fact the family arrived before William Penn did. There is an affidavit from one of the sons about how he was on the dock when Penn's ship arrived. One part of that family moved to North Carolina where he and his son were among the Regulators - a group that objected to taxation well before the Revolutionary War. There was also a strong German influence - in South Carolina some sons of indentured servants who served out their parents' indentured after they died - there is a document from their master stating that their requirements had been satisfied and that they were free to buy land. There is even a line of French Huguenots who got a special dispensation from the Virginia government in 1709 to allow them to settle there.

Having trained as an anthropologist, I know that scientists have no respect for the ancestors of anyone, not even their own. That is really no excuse, but when you look at what peoples have been dug up across the globe, they are pretty indiscriminate.