Because I wanted to one-up my sister, and prove to her that we really were more Scottish than her Ancestry.com DNA proved us to be in 2010, I decided to take a more up to date and state of the art type DNA test through another company in 2021 - surely 11 years of technology and research in the field of DNA would prove something had changed. What happens with the DNA results from so many years ago, is that we haven't changed, our parents and our ancestors haven't changed, but the amount of subjects and gene pool entries has changed and it has allowed for more accurate records to be pulled and pushed into the machines that eventually spit out what it is we are, who it is we are, where we came from, and more importantly, whether or not we are truly more English than we are Scottish!
I mean, you can't force your ancestors to stop what they've already done so you can hand pick your great grands up the line! If you did that, if you could do that, you would probably not even be born at all! So where it is true that we are stuck with our DNA, we can at least hope against all odds that the tartan kilted clansmen would fight to the finish and win out over their stuff shirt English cousins! It's no wonder I fight with myself over and over and over again. There simply isn't room enough inside these cells to accommodate the two sides of my family when they begin to feud at the microscopic level.
My Scottish (pure Scottish you understand) friends will all but laugh out loud at me when I mention that I'm about 44% Scottish. Ha! They say, "I'm 100% Scottish" oh, but that's not necessarily true. They'd be shocked to find out how the Irish creep in, how the English maneuver, and how the Welsh hide so intricately among the folds in the nucleuses and they scream "I AM ALIVE IN YOU!" when they get the chance. The thing is though, when the Welsh scream it, it sounds differently, and all the letters are squished together so you really have no idea what they just said, but you have a clue really that they're pretty excited to be able to say you're not as pure as you thought you were. Remember, the Scots didn't drop onto the isles from Heaven! They came in big ships from Scandinavia and from up the coast on either side! There are very very few Scots who can actually say they are 100% Scots. They just don't want to take the DNA tests to prove it. They like bragging about their family trees. That's nice, my family trees can be and have been researched as far back as the 13th Century - - it's just those Stringfellow/Strengfelauge and other ways to spell it, came from Jolly Ol' England! DAMMIT!
I did the MyHeritage kit and it came back that I was 30% Scandinavian, 28% English, 24% Scottish, 12% Iberian, and 5% Italian. No Irish, no Welsh. No Native American, but I sort of knew that. The whole thing with the fight for my blood however, is still up in the air because of the 30% Scandinavia thing. I wrote to the lab people at MyHeritage and was told that though they can't really pinpoint it at this time, but as time goes on there will be a more accurate telling since more and more people with the same markers that I have will have ancestors that are from identifiable places where pockets of that particular DNA match(es) are found. Maybe in 10 years I'll be more Scottish than I am English. The way I was instructed to address the Celt/Viking issue is to find out from which grouping I am from and they had another test for that. Turns out, and this excites me, we are far far far more Celt than anything else, and yes, that means that more of my Scandinavian family and/or peeps landed, stayed, and cultivated in the Scottish isles before moving southward. YEA!
My mother's maiden name is Edwards. Go figure. (don't get excited, I don't use my mother's maiden name for any passwords) My mother's mother is a Free and her mom's mom is a Hague. Mom's father was an Edwards, his mother was something English as well. The most and best I can find that leads to the Scottish sides are the Stringfellows on my dad's side and there was (and is) a great grandmother on mom's side who is from Edinburgh, so I'll cling to that. Dad's side has the most promising show of Celts who remained in what became Scotland and Northern England, a border area that was Scottish for hundreds if not thousands of years, but it wasn't Scottish most of the time as there were no Scots then, it belonged to the Celts. I'm not happy that the Celts were not Christian, but that's another blog for another time. I'd rather say I'm a Celt than a Saxon. Actually, I'm Celt, then Viking, then Saxon; to be more specific. I may have more English in me, but damn it I have more Celt!
The way the MyHeritage people put it was that I can divide the Scandinavian 30% into parts that correlate to the people who came down the west or east side of Scotland; that would make me more Celt and more "Scottish" by about another 65% of the 30% Scandinavians...so let's see, 65% of 30% is 19.5. That means I can add 19.5 (round it to 20) to my 24% Scottish and I'm 44% Scottish. That leaves 35% of 30% which is 10.5, so round it up to 11, and I'm 39% English. YES! YES! YES! I will take that. I'm not messing with the 12% Iberian or the 5% Italian. I'll accept them both since they have pigment to their skin and this would explain why only 17% of my body actually tans in the summer's sun! There had to be a reason, and now I know. Thank you, DNA.
Bottom line? I'm happy to be Celtic. I really don't believe what they believed, as I am a born again believer and follower of Christ, but eventually they too became converted because of the ministers and priests in Ireland. Someone somewhere decided to follow Jesus and for generations we Stringfellows and Edwards have been packing the pews ever since. I'm simply fascinated by the science behind all of the tests. A person could submit a test and not fill out any forms so the lab would be doing a blind testing and the lab would come back with exactly what that person's genealogy research had shown. In my family's case, my sister did the genealogy stuff for years. She was stumped for a minute and I picked it back up. She basically stopped at Plymouth Rock. We were here before that. We landed in the colonies in 1660 from Edinburgh (Stringfellows) and in the late 1600's with the Edwards side. I'm pretty sure we were some of the first to make mud pies in Virginia.
It's fun to know where you came from, and it's fun to realize where you're going next. For me, I can't have the latter without the former. I need to know where my soul is leading me and why every time I hear a bagpipe my heart skips a beat....and now I know. I guess I've always known. It's the same thing I feel when I see a mossy moor or close my eyes to know I am surrounded by love and warm wishes of those who have lived before me. We will meet again, "when it's my turn to fly", I can't wait.
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