vial of saliva my son spent 10 minutes filling up suddenly spun into a kaleidoscope of ancestral homelands . There they were . The places . The connections . Europe West . Europe South . Caucasus . Middle
East . Great Britain . Those five regions accounted for 75 percent of my son ’ s Ethnicity Estimate . It was a lot , and there was no indication of any
African blood .
Checked the rest , the “ Low Confidence Regions ,” when the predicted ethnicity percentage is less than 4.5 percent .
Saw Cameroon / Congo . Africa Southeastern Bantu . Mali . Benin / Togo . Ivory Coast / Ghana . Seemingly the entire continent , as well as a handful of percentage points from Europe East , the Iberian Peninsula , and Ireland / Scotland / Wales . Did the math . The racial arithmetic , along with everything my wife and I knew about the history of where our families came from , would determine the ethnic makeup of my son .
He is 31 percent German , which Ancestry folds into the Europe West region . I found out from my aunt that Caucasus and Middle East , which totaled 20 percent of his estimate , were included in her own DNA test results .
Must be a byproduct of our ancestors ’ migration from Asia Minor to Greece and my grandfather ’ s homeland of Cyprus , located just 65 miles west of Syria and Lebanon . Europe South includes both Italy and Greece and accounted for 18 percent of the estimate .
When I added all the countries and geographic ranges together , it turned out my son is about 18 percent African .
I didn ’ t know why Great Britain popped up at a whopping 6 percent . I didn ’ t know why Ireland made a paltry 1 percent appearance , considering the supposed depth of my in-laws ’ Irish ancestry .
Couldn ’ t figure out why the Iberian Peninsula and Europe East each snuck in at 2 percent . But the numbers were there , they were real , and I had to begin wrapping my brain around what it all meant .
Nothing .
Just numbers on a website . It meant nothing . No . It meant everything .
Benjamin Lampkin
Those numbers defined what my son was and , potentially , what he could be . I cycled through the possibilities , what the test meant to me , what it would mean to him , what I would tell others , what they would say about us . I had no answers .
I showed my wife the results , and she marveled at the 16 different ethnic regions , prepared to create a unique way to present the test as a cool gift to both sets of grandparents . She framed the map and ethnicity estimate for her parents , wrapped it for Christmas and I asked my in-laws to open the gift last that morning .
They were initially startled that we ’ d had the test done on our son , but my father-in-law examined the map and the numbers closely , curious about the disparity between the Irish and English percentages and the number of different African regions represented , and I saw a glimpse of highly-contained glee .
While he had questions and concerns about matters of privacy and DNA , given his medical background , he admitted that his only grandchild ’ s DNA was , indeed , fascinating .
I emailed the report to my parents and my siblings , received a small wave of texts and phone calls with some variation of “ Wow ,” “ That ’ s neat ,” and “ How interesting !”
After taking a couple of days to process , more calls and texts came , first from my brother , who thought our dad should take a DNA test and is curious about his own kids ’ ethnic makeup because of his wife ’ s Croatian background . And my sister and her husband were each highly enthused by the results and wanted to take a test . And my mom was surprised by the high concentration of German DNA versus her own Greek blood . And my dad commented on the minuscule African percentages present , though his interracial marriage , as well as mine , was one of the reasons why .
None of my family mentioned the absence of any Native American links in my son ’ s estimate . Not one measly percentage .
My initial reticence at looking at the results might have stemmed from the barely suppressed thought that those family stories were just that . I thought of Dr . Henry Louis Gates , the Harvard professor , author and filmmaker , who has commented on
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