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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