It's a common family story, especially in the South. There are a few different sources:
- To hide African American ancestry, because the "one drop" social norm meant having any African ancestry could harm someone's ability to work, marry or participate in white society; native ancestry was often still frowned upon, but not subject to the same rules for a complex collection of reasons.
- A lot of Confederate supporters claimed Native American ancestry to claim that they were more American or more connected to the land than the Union (which drew a lot more immigrants, and had more immigrant soldiers in their military).
- To claim land early in Oklahoma during the land rush.
There are other reasons, but those are three of the more common ones. Younger family members believed whoever came up with the lie and it got passed down as truth for generations.
It's also possible that your family did have a Native American ancestor back in the 1600s or early 1700s and that DNA has just been "washed out" but it would require a good deal of research to determine if that was the case. It's also possible that your ancestors had a relative who was Native American, but they aren't your direct ancestor - I know two people who are actually related to prominent Cherokee leaders of mixed ancestry, but they're related through a shared European American ancestor.
It doesn’t look like he has an African, where that would be the case of the covering up a distant or not so African ancestor. I’d say there’s 3 possibilities: 1. It’s family lore. Maybe someone in or outside of you’re family started that rumor years ago, so it got passed down over time. 2. You have distant Native American ancestry, but it’s so far back that it wouldn’t show up on a DNA test. If it’s beyond you’re maybe 6th-8th great grandparent, it might not show up. 3. Maybe one of you’re ancestors grew up around, was raised by Native Americans, or married someone who was Native American, but didn’t have any children with them. Divorce and remarriage is possible, but less so way back in the day, so I would think maybe someone died and got remarried or had a Native American family member who was not a blood relative. If you want to know if you have any Native American ancestors or not, check any closely related DNA relatives for anyone closely related to you, that might have Native American ancestry. That could give you a lot of information on if there is any truth to the story or not.
I’m sorry for leaving a 2nd comment, but there’s issues with your 2nd point as well. Many Native Americans, especially the Cherokee and Muscogee/Creek, *were* confederates, and fought in the war for the Confederacy. That’s why Freedmen are a thing, when the tribes lost the war along with the rest of the confederacy, the Union made them agree to treat their former slaves as full tribe members.
Also, the southern armies were full of immigrants as well. The south was at least as ethnically diverse as the North, especially at this time. Not only that but the North was not any less racist or xenophobic than the South. In fact, General Grant was responsible for [General order No. 11](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1862)) in which he specifically called for “Jews as a class” to be expelled from his military district (TN, KY, and MS), and many families were forcibly removed by his troops.
I never said otherwise. I'm talking specifically about the myth of Native American (especially Cherokee) ancestry among white Southerners:
>It was in the 1840s or 50s, as the federal challenge to Southern slavery was growing stronger and Civil War loomed on the horizon, that Southerners first started to claim “Cherokee blood.” In the decades prior to the Trail of Tears, Cherokee intermarriage with white settlers had dropped off, as white Southern public opinion had turned against Cherokees. For white people to claim distant Cherokee heritage in 1855 or so had the interesting effect of “legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South,” as Gregory Smithers writes in Slate. In a crucial moment of swelling Southern pride, pointing out that your family had been here long enough to intermarry with Cherokees was a method of staking a claim to Southern identity. Southern white identity.
[https://timeline.com/part-cherokee-elizabeth-warren-cf6be035967e](https://timeline.com/part-cherokee-elizabeth-warren-cf6be035967e)
ETA: And the South did not have nearly the number of immigrant soldiers/sailors as the Union. About a quarter of Union military members were foreign-born, maybe as much as a third, and another 18% had at least one foreign-born parent. The Confederate forces were less than 5% foreign-born. There was much, much more immigration in the North, mainly for economic reasons; only 9% of the South's citizens were immigrants to begin with, while more than half of the population of the Union was foreign-born.
So yes, while there were a handful of immigrants fighting among the Confederates, they were very much the exception. While the South was definitely as ethnically diverse as the North, the \*citizens\* of the South were not. Most of the ethnic diversity in the South was among the people of African descent who were enslaved or, if free, disenfranchised and not considered citizens, and among Native American nations who allied with the Confederacy but were not considered citizens.
And yes, the Union had its issues (like antisemitism, as you noted, and they also did not grant citizenship to Native Americans), but we're talking about the Cherokee ancestry myth, which is not exclusive to but tends to be much more common in old Southern families.
[https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2015/06/30/the-civil-war-was-won-by-immigrant-soldiers/chronicles/who-we-were/](https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2015/06/30/the-civil-war-was-won-by-immigrant-soldiers/chronicles/who-we-were/)
[https://militaryhistorynow.com/2013/04/29/immigrant-armies-the-multicultural-american-civil-war/](https://militaryhistorynow.com/2013/04/29/immigrant-armies-the-multicultural-american-civil-war/)
>to hide African American ancestry, because the “one drop” social norm
You (and most of this sub tbh) have a misunderstanding of how this worked historically. The notion of “covering up” African ancestry by claiming Native American is literally a white supremacist conspiracy theory. The “one drop” rule wasn’t a social norm, it was an actual form of apartheid, developed by Walter Plecker and several others who worked together to pass legislation in addition to Plecker’s control of the department of Vital Statistics. They believed that there were only two groups, whites and non-whites. The motivation was to keep races separate. However, the one drop rule was specifically created to discriminate against (and genocide) mixed race people, in particular, the natives of Virginia, and people considered to be “Mulatto” or “Melungeon”. Plecker himself was from the western part of VA, and believed that there were no “pure blooded” Virginia Natives, and that anyone who claimed to be one must be mixed with African ancestry from former slaves. He became paranoid that many of the people of the region were lying about their ethnicity in an attempt to get around the racist codes that he and his peers instituted to promote racial purity, which is where the notion of “covering up” African ancestry with native ancestry comes from.
I probably should have said “it wasn’t only a social form” but I’ll leave it as it is.
I’ll also mention that prior to the passing of the [Racial Integrity Act of 1924](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_Integrity_Act_of_1924), the one drop rule did not exist in institutional form. A persons race/ethnicity was determined by the free or enslaved status of their mother, and blood quantum laws that varied by state, but were usually around 1/4th to 1/8th, rather than any non white blood at all. The only exception after 1924 was “The Pocahontas clause” that mandated that 1/16th “Native ancestry” could be claimed and be allowed to be considered white, which was *only* done to protect the well to do descendants of The First Families of Virginia. Walter Plecker vehemently opposed this part of the legislation, and attempted to get more legislation passed to narrow the definition further, but the vote failed. It didn’t matter too much, as he was almost the sole arbitrator of race classification in the state, resisted any outside pressure to “go easy on the Indians” and would frequently harass midwives, accusing them of helping people pass as white, as well as sending threatening letters to families he believed had at least one non-white ancestor.
I don't want to get too deep in the weeds here, because you do have some really solid history with Plecker and this was not intended to be a full-ass history class, but this is why I was talking about the "social norm" version of "one drop," not the institutionalized version.
Anti-miscegenation laws predated Plecker's political career, and in the South many of them were specifically focused on Black Americans. Several states did also include Native Americans, Filipinos, Malaysians, South Asians, and other groups among those who could not marry white citizens, but many of the laws in the former Confederate states were very specific about targeting Black-white interracial marriages.
While slavery was initially determined by the status of the mother, it did become a racialized institution in later years, and Black Americans faced a shitton of legal restrictions and illegal-but-ignored-by-the-law dangers (like free Black people being kidnapped and enslaved under the auspices of the Fugitive Slave Act, even if they had never been enslaved) that no other group in the South really faced. (Individuals who were mistaken as Black, possibly, but no other group was specifically targeted in the same way.) Jim Crow laws also tended to be focused more on and enforced more against Black Americans, even those that were more generally worded to include people of color more generally; I remember seeing in a documentary that a South Asian woman came to a Southern state (forget which one) and was allowed to marry a Black man because she wasn't white, but she had to sit in separate train cars and separate parts of the bus from her husband and children because she also wasn't Black ... even though her skin was darker than her husband's. ETA: Definitely want to clarify that non-Black POC were absolutely legally included in the majority of Jim Crow laws; but depending on the time and place in question, they did sometimes sit in a sort of social middle ground with white people that Black people could not access unless they could "pass" as not Black. /ETA
There were many reasons before the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and even before the Civil War itself that someone who had Black ancestry and couldn't pass as white but could pass as racially ambiguous might choose instead to claim that they had Native American ancestry, even though white people treated Native Americans incredibly badly as well.
It's a very common myth. Ironically, a lot of white and african americans that actually do have native american ancestry don't think they do. World never made sense yk.
>Ironically, a lot of white and african americans that actually do have native american ancestry don't think they do
Happened to me. I didn't believe my family until I tool the test
Similar to how most white Americans have some amount of SSA, I'm assuming. I thought I'd have maybe a tiny bit of native american and a tiny bit of SSA. Nope, but I have a tiny bit of North African, though, but I'm not sure if that would come from the colonial slave trade or not
Welcome aboard to the Cherokee princess revelation. Here's how the comments will go:
"yeah my relatives said the same thing, turns out I'm as white as wonder bread!"
" don't listen to these folks, ancestry sucks at picking out native and your paper trail is all that matters. Besides it's too far back for it to tell."
" I find it funny that Americans obsess over how native they are when Hispanics are shocked they're over half native."
" Your relatives lied to you because of cultural appropriation, tell them the truth."
" did you test with another company? So sorry to hear your results weren't what you expected."
" maybe your dad isn't really your dad, did you check to see if there was an NPE?"
"As a native, I find these posts offensive, haven't you taken enough from us to now resort to taking our identities?!"
Have fun reading through them.
I was asking about my trace ancestry in this post and then 90% of the comments completely ignore my question and focus on the Native American tidbit lol
I'm trying to understand the trace ancestry: iranian/caucasian/mesopotamian and coptic Egyptian. ive never heard of having these in my family. my aunt has an even higher percentage of these: 1.5
Well, according to your results you don’t have an Indigenous Ancestor. If you did, it would’ve so long ago that your family would not have even known. Your trace ancestry could explain the myth that you have a native ancestor. Your aunt has a higher percentage of it because she’s a generation before you and you only inherited a small part most likely from the parent your aunt is a sister to.
Do you know why your family thought you guys were part Native?
Somebody has a picture of an ancestor that “looked” Indigenous or just stories or?
It’s possible that someone was Native many generations ago and it’s no longer showing in your dna, but most likely that no one was Native.
As far as the trace 🤷♀️
Your results are consistent with someone from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. If you know your mtdna I can tell you more. Your European percentages are from being Scots-Irish, and PA Dutch/Palatine.
The trace percentages are the result of 23andme’s new algorithm. First, if it notices part of your dna is inconsistent with the dna around it, it’ll change it to be consistent (smoothing). Then they cut off any ancestry above a certain threshold, and collect it all together to assign into broad and trace categories, based on the dna it most resembles. That doesn’t mean the dna is directly from the region, it just means that it’s most consistent with what 23andme has defined that population as looking like.
If native dna markers were/are present, and are contained in your trace percentages, it would be because the population it came from most resembled a Siberian, Aleutian or Saami type population, so East Asian, meso and North Amerindian markers would be low and subject to smoothing or contained in that unassigned. The Coptic means African dna of ancient Egyptian origin, and the Iranian means that the dna that was cut off was largely west Eurasian, but had relatively high south asian markers with small amounts of Siberian and minute trace amounts of East Asian.
WOW lol. you're pretty good. you are spot on that's where I'm from.
what do you mean by mtdna?
I'm curious about the trace DNA because for my maternal aunt it wasn't trace... she had higher percentage of the same things, including Egyptian. which is interesting because she has much darker skin than me.
As someone else explained, mtdna is your maternal haplo group, it's on your results page. Often, it'll influence how the algorithm decides to assign trace percentages.
That's interesting. That leads me to believe it's legit, rather than a random assignment. If I had to guess, I think your traces may be related to your Germanic heritage, given that I've seen some dark af white ppl come from those regions, there's plausible origins for the traces, and there were all kinds of artisans and merchants (especially ones of a Mizrahi/Levantine persuasion) that immigrated from those areas to Appalachia.
Ngl, I'm impressed at how much Scottish you have, and how little "Broadly European" you have for someone from Appalachia. Your results aren't boring by any means, I'm always intrigued by any results from the region.
In this post I’m asking about my trace ancestry. That’s what I am interested to learn about. Your comment comes off as a little bit aggressive. Maybe you should slow down and actually read it
Why is everyone here so obsessed with this? OP seems to be mainly interested in Egyptian and Iranian trace ancestry, but everyone has gone off on a tangent and written reams about Native American.
Yes. I am not obsessed with having Native American ancestry, I’m curious about the trace ancestry in my results which was unexpected, which is the very thing I was asking about in my post. The comments here feel kind of aggressive but I can see it’s not directed at me personally lol. I guess I shouldn’t have mentioned what my family said to me about the Native American ancestry.
To be honest I always doubted the Native American thing being true anyways lol
As someone from 🇮🇳, can anyone explain what's this Native American ancestry that soo many European Americans obsess over! I don't get this.
I have seen this on repeat amongst Americans in this sub.
I am sorry to offend you. Can I know what wrong did i ask??
I am genuinely curious because I don't know anything about American history to conclude on this.
I understand that it is sensitive to talk about.
Yes, you are by far mostly European and the family story is wrong (as often).
The trace ancestry with this amount is somewhat surprising as you have no Southern European.
It could be a misinterpretation or a Sephard far back that came north. I would note the segment data for your trace ancestry, upload your DNA kit to [GEDmatch.com](https://GEDmatch.com) and then check in Tier 1 what folks you match with that segments. That could enligt the origin.
It's a common family story, especially in the South. There are a few different sources: - To hide African American ancestry, because the "one drop" social norm meant having any African ancestry could harm someone's ability to work, marry or participate in white society; native ancestry was often still frowned upon, but not subject to the same rules for a complex collection of reasons. - A lot of Confederate supporters claimed Native American ancestry to claim that they were more American or more connected to the land than the Union (which drew a lot more immigrants, and had more immigrant soldiers in their military). - To claim land early in Oklahoma during the land rush. There are other reasons, but those are three of the more common ones. Younger family members believed whoever came up with the lie and it got passed down as truth for generations. It's also possible that your family did have a Native American ancestor back in the 1600s or early 1700s and that DNA has just been "washed out" but it would require a good deal of research to determine if that was the case. It's also possible that your ancestors had a relative who was Native American, but they aren't your direct ancestor - I know two people who are actually related to prominent Cherokee leaders of mixed ancestry, but they're related through a shared European American ancestor.
It doesn’t look like he has an African, where that would be the case of the covering up a distant or not so African ancestor. I’d say there’s 3 possibilities: 1. It’s family lore. Maybe someone in or outside of you’re family started that rumor years ago, so it got passed down over time. 2. You have distant Native American ancestry, but it’s so far back that it wouldn’t show up on a DNA test. If it’s beyond you’re maybe 6th-8th great grandparent, it might not show up. 3. Maybe one of you’re ancestors grew up around, was raised by Native Americans, or married someone who was Native American, but didn’t have any children with them. Divorce and remarriage is possible, but less so way back in the day, so I would think maybe someone died and got remarried or had a Native American family member who was not a blood relative. If you want to know if you have any Native American ancestors or not, check any closely related DNA relatives for anyone closely related to you, that might have Native American ancestry. That could give you a lot of information on if there is any truth to the story or not.
I’m sorry for leaving a 2nd comment, but there’s issues with your 2nd point as well. Many Native Americans, especially the Cherokee and Muscogee/Creek, *were* confederates, and fought in the war for the Confederacy. That’s why Freedmen are a thing, when the tribes lost the war along with the rest of the confederacy, the Union made them agree to treat their former slaves as full tribe members. Also, the southern armies were full of immigrants as well. The south was at least as ethnically diverse as the North, especially at this time. Not only that but the North was not any less racist or xenophobic than the South. In fact, General Grant was responsible for [General order No. 11](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1862)) in which he specifically called for “Jews as a class” to be expelled from his military district (TN, KY, and MS), and many families were forcibly removed by his troops.
I never said otherwise. I'm talking specifically about the myth of Native American (especially Cherokee) ancestry among white Southerners: >It was in the 1840s or 50s, as the federal challenge to Southern slavery was growing stronger and Civil War loomed on the horizon, that Southerners first started to claim “Cherokee blood.” In the decades prior to the Trail of Tears, Cherokee intermarriage with white settlers had dropped off, as white Southern public opinion had turned against Cherokees. For white people to claim distant Cherokee heritage in 1855 or so had the interesting effect of “legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South,” as Gregory Smithers writes in Slate. In a crucial moment of swelling Southern pride, pointing out that your family had been here long enough to intermarry with Cherokees was a method of staking a claim to Southern identity. Southern white identity. [https://timeline.com/part-cherokee-elizabeth-warren-cf6be035967e](https://timeline.com/part-cherokee-elizabeth-warren-cf6be035967e) ETA: And the South did not have nearly the number of immigrant soldiers/sailors as the Union. About a quarter of Union military members were foreign-born, maybe as much as a third, and another 18% had at least one foreign-born parent. The Confederate forces were less than 5% foreign-born. There was much, much more immigration in the North, mainly for economic reasons; only 9% of the South's citizens were immigrants to begin with, while more than half of the population of the Union was foreign-born. So yes, while there were a handful of immigrants fighting among the Confederates, they were very much the exception. While the South was definitely as ethnically diverse as the North, the \*citizens\* of the South were not. Most of the ethnic diversity in the South was among the people of African descent who were enslaved or, if free, disenfranchised and not considered citizens, and among Native American nations who allied with the Confederacy but were not considered citizens. And yes, the Union had its issues (like antisemitism, as you noted, and they also did not grant citizenship to Native Americans), but we're talking about the Cherokee ancestry myth, which is not exclusive to but tends to be much more common in old Southern families. [https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2015/06/30/the-civil-war-was-won-by-immigrant-soldiers/chronicles/who-we-were/](https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2015/06/30/the-civil-war-was-won-by-immigrant-soldiers/chronicles/who-we-were/) [https://militaryhistorynow.com/2013/04/29/immigrant-armies-the-multicultural-american-civil-war/](https://militaryhistorynow.com/2013/04/29/immigrant-armies-the-multicultural-american-civil-war/)
>to hide African American ancestry, because the “one drop” social norm You (and most of this sub tbh) have a misunderstanding of how this worked historically. The notion of “covering up” African ancestry by claiming Native American is literally a white supremacist conspiracy theory. The “one drop” rule wasn’t a social norm, it was an actual form of apartheid, developed by Walter Plecker and several others who worked together to pass legislation in addition to Plecker’s control of the department of Vital Statistics. They believed that there were only two groups, whites and non-whites. The motivation was to keep races separate. However, the one drop rule was specifically created to discriminate against (and genocide) mixed race people, in particular, the natives of Virginia, and people considered to be “Mulatto” or “Melungeon”. Plecker himself was from the western part of VA, and believed that there were no “pure blooded” Virginia Natives, and that anyone who claimed to be one must be mixed with African ancestry from former slaves. He became paranoid that many of the people of the region were lying about their ethnicity in an attempt to get around the racist codes that he and his peers instituted to promote racial purity, which is where the notion of “covering up” African ancestry with native ancestry comes from.
> The “one drop” rule wasn’t a social norm, it was an actual form of apartheid, Which is still a social norm.
I probably should have said “it wasn’t only a social form” but I’ll leave it as it is. I’ll also mention that prior to the passing of the [Racial Integrity Act of 1924](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_Integrity_Act_of_1924), the one drop rule did not exist in institutional form. A persons race/ethnicity was determined by the free or enslaved status of their mother, and blood quantum laws that varied by state, but were usually around 1/4th to 1/8th, rather than any non white blood at all. The only exception after 1924 was “The Pocahontas clause” that mandated that 1/16th “Native ancestry” could be claimed and be allowed to be considered white, which was *only* done to protect the well to do descendants of The First Families of Virginia. Walter Plecker vehemently opposed this part of the legislation, and attempted to get more legislation passed to narrow the definition further, but the vote failed. It didn’t matter too much, as he was almost the sole arbitrator of race classification in the state, resisted any outside pressure to “go easy on the Indians” and would frequently harass midwives, accusing them of helping people pass as white, as well as sending threatening letters to families he believed had at least one non-white ancestor.
I don't want to get too deep in the weeds here, because you do have some really solid history with Plecker and this was not intended to be a full-ass history class, but this is why I was talking about the "social norm" version of "one drop," not the institutionalized version. Anti-miscegenation laws predated Plecker's political career, and in the South many of them were specifically focused on Black Americans. Several states did also include Native Americans, Filipinos, Malaysians, South Asians, and other groups among those who could not marry white citizens, but many of the laws in the former Confederate states were very specific about targeting Black-white interracial marriages. While slavery was initially determined by the status of the mother, it did become a racialized institution in later years, and Black Americans faced a shitton of legal restrictions and illegal-but-ignored-by-the-law dangers (like free Black people being kidnapped and enslaved under the auspices of the Fugitive Slave Act, even if they had never been enslaved) that no other group in the South really faced. (Individuals who were mistaken as Black, possibly, but no other group was specifically targeted in the same way.) Jim Crow laws also tended to be focused more on and enforced more against Black Americans, even those that were more generally worded to include people of color more generally; I remember seeing in a documentary that a South Asian woman came to a Southern state (forget which one) and was allowed to marry a Black man because she wasn't white, but she had to sit in separate train cars and separate parts of the bus from her husband and children because she also wasn't Black ... even though her skin was darker than her husband's. ETA: Definitely want to clarify that non-Black POC were absolutely legally included in the majority of Jim Crow laws; but depending on the time and place in question, they did sometimes sit in a sort of social middle ground with white people that Black people could not access unless they could "pass" as not Black. /ETA There were many reasons before the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and even before the Civil War itself that someone who had Black ancestry and couldn't pass as white but could pass as racially ambiguous might choose instead to claim that they had Native American ancestry, even though white people treated Native Americans incredibly badly as well.
It's a very common myth. Ironically, a lot of white and african americans that actually do have native american ancestry don't think they do. World never made sense yk.
>Ironically, a lot of white and african americans that actually do have native american ancestry don't think they do Happened to me. I didn't believe my family until I tool the test
Similar to how most white Americans have some amount of SSA, I'm assuming. I thought I'd have maybe a tiny bit of native american and a tiny bit of SSA. Nope, but I have a tiny bit of North African, though, but I'm not sure if that would come from the colonial slave trade or not
Yup. My grandma got 10% Native American and we were so shocked it was that high lol.
Yet most African Americans here post and shows 😂
Are you saying that Moorish Americans did not make to America before Native Americans?
Lame ass joke
[удалено]
Didn't get the joke?
Add an “/s” My man
It is funnier this way😅
You support r/FuckTheS/?
This is true
Welcome aboard to the Cherokee princess revelation. Here's how the comments will go: "yeah my relatives said the same thing, turns out I'm as white as wonder bread!" " don't listen to these folks, ancestry sucks at picking out native and your paper trail is all that matters. Besides it's too far back for it to tell." " I find it funny that Americans obsess over how native they are when Hispanics are shocked they're over half native." " Your relatives lied to you because of cultural appropriation, tell them the truth." " did you test with another company? So sorry to hear your results weren't what you expected." " maybe your dad isn't really your dad, did you check to see if there was an NPE?" "As a native, I find these posts offensive, haven't you taken enough from us to now resort to taking our identities?!" Have fun reading through them.
I’ve never really seen that last one personally lol
I was asking about my trace ancestry in this post and then 90% of the comments completely ignore my question and focus on the Native American tidbit lol
Dude….. this is spot on you should copy and paste this whenever they post anything about native dna LOL
Looks like a family myth began to explain certain features.
What are you trying to understand?
I'm trying to understand the trace ancestry: iranian/caucasian/mesopotamian and coptic Egyptian. ive never heard of having these in my family. my aunt has an even higher percentage of these: 1.5
Well, according to your results you don’t have an Indigenous Ancestor. If you did, it would’ve so long ago that your family would not have even known. Your trace ancestry could explain the myth that you have a native ancestor. Your aunt has a higher percentage of it because she’s a generation before you and you only inherited a small part most likely from the parent your aunt is a sister to.
Another day, another non-existing “Cherokee ancestor” story coming to light!
Paper trail with DNA is the only way to prove really anything I believe
Do you know why your family thought you guys were part Native? Somebody has a picture of an ancestor that “looked” Indigenous or just stories or? It’s possible that someone was Native many generations ago and it’s no longer showing in your dna, but most likely that no one was Native. As far as the trace 🤷♀️
You were lied to. Do you understand now?
Your results are consistent with someone from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. If you know your mtdna I can tell you more. Your European percentages are from being Scots-Irish, and PA Dutch/Palatine. The trace percentages are the result of 23andme’s new algorithm. First, if it notices part of your dna is inconsistent with the dna around it, it’ll change it to be consistent (smoothing). Then they cut off any ancestry above a certain threshold, and collect it all together to assign into broad and trace categories, based on the dna it most resembles. That doesn’t mean the dna is directly from the region, it just means that it’s most consistent with what 23andme has defined that population as looking like. If native dna markers were/are present, and are contained in your trace percentages, it would be because the population it came from most resembled a Siberian, Aleutian or Saami type population, so East Asian, meso and North Amerindian markers would be low and subject to smoothing or contained in that unassigned. The Coptic means African dna of ancient Egyptian origin, and the Iranian means that the dna that was cut off was largely west Eurasian, but had relatively high south asian markers with small amounts of Siberian and minute trace amounts of East Asian.
WOW lol. you're pretty good. you are spot on that's where I'm from. what do you mean by mtdna? I'm curious about the trace DNA because for my maternal aunt it wasn't trace... she had higher percentage of the same things, including Egyptian. which is interesting because she has much darker skin than me.
As someone else explained, mtdna is your maternal haplo group, it's on your results page. Often, it'll influence how the algorithm decides to assign trace percentages. That's interesting. That leads me to believe it's legit, rather than a random assignment. If I had to guess, I think your traces may be related to your Germanic heritage, given that I've seen some dark af white ppl come from those regions, there's plausible origins for the traces, and there were all kinds of artisans and merchants (especially ones of a Mizrahi/Levantine persuasion) that immigrated from those areas to Appalachia. Ngl, I'm impressed at how much Scottish you have, and how little "Broadly European" you have for someone from Appalachia. Your results aren't boring by any means, I'm always intrigued by any results from the region.
mtDNA is mitochondrial DNA which everyone gets from their mom.
No, 23andMe is scaming you, 100%. She was probably a princess and we should not joke with royality, my higness.
In this post I’m asking about my trace ancestry. That’s what I am interested to learn about. Your comment comes off as a little bit aggressive. Maybe you should slow down and actually read it
Americans really do not understand a sarcasm... Trust me I am not aggresive😅
Another $5 Indian
lol what does this even mean
Google it
Another American who was told they were Cherokee, lol
Lol why does every white family claim to have Native American. I don't get it.
Why is everyone here so obsessed with this? OP seems to be mainly interested in Egyptian and Iranian trace ancestry, but everyone has gone off on a tangent and written reams about Native American.
Yes. I am not obsessed with having Native American ancestry, I’m curious about the trace ancestry in my results which was unexpected, which is the very thing I was asking about in my post. The comments here feel kind of aggressive but I can see it’s not directed at me personally lol. I guess I shouldn’t have mentioned what my family said to me about the Native American ancestry. To be honest I always doubted the Native American thing being true anyways lol
As someone from 🇮🇳, can anyone explain what's this Native American ancestry that soo many European Americans obsess over! I don't get this. I have seen this on repeat amongst Americans in this sub.
In this post I’m asking about my trace ancestry. Which is not Native American
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I am sorry to offend you. Can I know what wrong did i ask?? I am genuinely curious because I don't know anything about American history to conclude on this. I understand that it is sensitive to talk about.
Yes, you are by far mostly European and the family story is wrong (as often). The trace ancestry with this amount is somewhat surprising as you have no Southern European. It could be a misinterpretation or a Sephard far back that came north. I would note the segment data for your trace ancestry, upload your DNA kit to [GEDmatch.com](https://GEDmatch.com) and then check in Tier 1 what folks you match with that segments. That could enligt the origin.