Ancestry DNA and Family Secrets

For the past few years I've done a LOT of genealogy, so when ancestry.com had a sale on their DNA testing a couple of years ago, I ordered a test and had my DNA done.  Sadly, here are my results:



I say sadly because all the cousins showing up in ancestry.com are my real life cousins, so I was not adopted and I'm not really the love child of Howard Hughes or anything like that.  -sigh-

When I was growing up, we were very poor, so I spent a lot of time daydreaming about what it would be like to discover that I was accidentally mixed up in the hospital, and I should have gone home with my real parents, the King and Queen of England, whom I imagined happened to be secretly traveling in Cherokee County, South Carolina when the Queen had to give birth.

Oh yes.  I had a wild imagination back then.  I know my real life friends among you readers are shocked that I would daydream such a thing.  -grin-

Oh well...so...no rich people are going to show up to claim me.  Figures.

However, I did discover some interesting things.  One of my close DNA cousins is a very beautiful African American woman who was adopted at birth and is searching for her birth parents.  Well, she thought she was an African American woman.   Turns out she's my second or third cousin, which means someone in my family that I probably know gave this beautiful child up for adoption.

I wonder what other gossipy facts will be uncovered via my DNA?

As for my family tree, I've learned that I'm a direct descendant of both French and Scottish Nobility.  These were my several greats grandparents:

• The Marquis Jean Paul Frederick de Hulingues of the old French Province of Bearne and his wife, Isabella du Portal, who was a Lady in Waiting to Queen Catherine de' Medici, and also,
• Laird David Ross, the second Laird of Balblair, Parish of Fern, near the town of Tain, in the shire of Ross, North Scotland (He succeeded to the estate of Balblair at the death of his father, Andrew, 15 Apr 1678.) and his wife, Margaret Stronach.

My direct line also boasts a physician, a judge, a founder of a town in Pennsylvania, ironmasters, farmers, preachers, soldiers, sailors, etc. etc. etc., but after my family moved to the mountains and hill country of the Carolinas, my family tree has secrets we just don't often talk about in polite company. 

I'm not that polite.

• My great-grandfathers were brothers.  
• One of those brothers had a third wife who was the other brother's daughter.  (The brothers did NOT speak after that. Thus explaining why my mother's people didn't like my father's people and vice versa...even though they were the SAME PEOPLE!)
• A Great-Great-Great Grandmother married twice.  One husband fathered both my father and mother's paternal line.  The other husband fathered my mother's maternal line.
• In my mother's maternal line, my great-grandparents were step siblings, but also cousins.

My family tree is very complicated. There are a LOT of cousins marrying cousins.

I may be my own Grandmaw.  😉

Honestly, the longer I live, the more I believe truth is much stranger than fiction.

There are also Birds in my family tree.  Seriously, but that is a story for another day.

Today I'm just wondering what other secrets will fall out as I shake my family tree?  Permanent official records may contain mistakes, but DNA does not lie.  I can't wait to see what falls out of this tree as the DNA technology becomes more sophisticated. Amazing.

Life just gets curiouser and curiouser....