Surprise! I’m a Swiss-Pennsylvania-Ontario Mennonite

Around Christmas, I decided that I should get my DNA tested. I thought it might help determine definitively whether my mystery ancestor, Louis Beeshy, was in fact, as family lore suggests, part Quebecois and part Aboriginal. Great-grandma Caroline Randall’s background is also a bit murky, especially on her mother’s side. And finally, I thought it would be a good test of commercial DNA testing: since I know exactly where all of my ancestors but a handful lived (going back 7 or more generations), it would be very interesting to see where the DNA test says my ancestors are from. If it were suggested that I had ancestors from central Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, we’d know the analysis was a tad suspect.

Anyway, I checked out the major online purveyors of DNA testing and decided ancestry.com was our best bet, mostly because they had a Christmas promotion that made them marginally less expensive than the others (of course, I had also seen more of their adverts on TV and the web than any of the other outfits). So, on December 21, I put in an order for two test kits—two because I hadn’t yet picked up a gift for Sande, and I was sure she would love a DNA test kit more than anything.

It took a couple of weeks for the kits to arrive, from somewhere in Germany. The first day that we had nothing else to do, we cracked them open and spent some time generating enough spit to fill the little plastic vials. After packaging them up (being especially careful to put the right vial in the right postage-paid return box), we walked downtown to post them off to Ireland, where the testing was to be done. (Germany? Ireland? Why?) It was a bitterly cold day, I recall, and I worried that freezing would ruin our precious spit as it lay in the bottom of the post-box overnight. Then, all we had to do was wait—and, rather more frequently than seemed healthy, to check the ancestry.com website to monitor the progress. It seemed weeks before they indicated that they’d received our samples, weeks more before they opened the packages, and so on.

Well, that wasn’t actually all we had to do. We also spent some time building ancestor trees on the ancestry.com website (by the way, ancestry.com is not a sponsor of this post; I paid full price for our test kits, and anyone, should they wish to research their genealogy, can get a free 14-day trial subscription to their databases of information about billions of people). We both had quite a bit of information already about our ancestors, so we plugged in the names and birthdates of our parents and grandparents, and very quickly we were inundated with hints and suggestions about more distant forebears and far-flung relatives. We could access the family trees of other users who shared ancestors with us, as well as find historical records in which known or potential ancestors were referenced. This process killed a lot of time and pushed our knowledge quite a long way back into the past.

When we weren’t absorbed in that, we could watch the DNA process timeline slowly creep along: sample processing … DNA extracted … DNA analyzed … and so on—until yesterday, just over 2 months after spitting in the vial, I received the email saying my results were complete (Sande’s seem to be a day or two behind mine). Can you imagine my excitement as I clicked the link to reveal where I come from and who I am related to?

Well, the first revelation was that I carry no trace of North American Indigenous DNA in my spit. And there is no suggestion that any of my people ever lived for any length of time anywhere near the St Lawrence river in Quebec. I have heard Henry Louis Gates Jr say (on the PBS show Finding Your Roots) that just one 3 or 4xgreat-grandparent’s ethnic origin will show up as 1% to 2% in your DNA results. Quebecois or Native American? Nada. Zip. So it seems highly unlikely that Louis Beeshy’s mother was aboriginal or either of his parents French-Canadian. There goes that story. The guy remains a complete mystery.

Well, maybe he was Swedish-Danish. At an estimated 0 – 11%, that particular ethnicity was pretty unexpected. It’s gotta be either Beeshy or my grandmother Annie Brox’s Randall line, which hails from England. I suppose the latter is most likely, as there’s a lot of Viking DNA in Britain, especially the parts the Randalls come from.

But enough of the small stuff. As might well be predicted, my ethnicity is estimated at 55 – 75% Germanic Europe (including Switzerland, Germany, and northeastern France), 27 – 32% England and Northwestern Europe (including Holland, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Palatinate), 0 – 13% France (again including Alsace-Lorraine and the Palatinate), and the aforementioned Sweden. Yup, all the places the Swiss Mennonites lived in Europe before coming to North America, along with a smidgen of English/Norse.

Can you guess where the vast majority of my closest relatives live? Pennsylvania (specifically Lancaster county); northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; and southwestern Ontario (specifically Waterloo County and north into Perth, Huron, and Bruce). Well, duh! I hardly had to spend $100 to learn this stuff, did I?

The more interesting bit is that ancestry.com uses my DNA results in combination with my posted family tree to discover other individuals they’ve tested who are likely my relatives. They have so far highlighted eight individuals who share large swathes of my DNA and have a common ancestor in their family tree, who ancestry.com suggests are close cousins. (No, there aren’t any unexpected children or previously unrevealed siblings in my closet—despite the fact that Waterloo Region Generations lists an older sister supposedly named Elizabeth.) I was able to find many of these people quickly in ezraeby.com and check that, yes, all but one or two are clearly relatives, and one is a second cousin (the others are third or more distant cousins).

This second cousin, Sandra, is really quite interesting. Her maternal grandfather, Jeremiah R Martin, is the elder half-brother of my maternal grandfather, Peter B Martin. Jeremiah’s mother, Susannah Reist, was Peter P Martin’s first wife, while Peter B’s mother, Lydia Brubacher, was his second (you can find the story of the Peter P Martin family here). I have no memory of ever meeting great-uncle Jeremiah (though he might have been at my grandfather’s funeral) or any of his descendants, so finding Sandra is pretty cool. She grew up and still lives in northern Ontario. I’ve already sent her a message of introduction, and she has briefly replied; I hope to communicate with her more.

For each of the relatives that are highlighted for me, there is a long list of individuals (more than 1000 in total) who are probable shared relatives. In many cases, these people do not have a public family tree or have no tree at all, so it’s hard to determine whether or how we’re related. There are some suggested fourth or fifth cousins who might be interesting to follow up, especially since their trees do not show any Waterloo County names that I recognize: the connection must be way back in Pennsylvania, and they must live in some other part of the Swiss-Menno diaspora.

So, I think it was a pretty good Christmas gift to myself. I didn’t get anything near closure on the question of Louis Beeshy (I think he is going to remain a mystery forever), and I didn’t get any knock-me-over surprises. But I think I’ve confirmed that DNA testing does have some value. Most excitingly, I have perhaps opened the door to some previously unknown relatives. I’ve had pretty much enough of the old dead ones anyway: time to get to know some live ones.