While in a café, Freaks, in Carcassonne, sheltering from the cold in a cosy chair, I perused from the book shelf a brill old gypsy book with super black and white photos from the 60's and 70's, 'Tsiganes et Gitanes' by Hans Silvester and Jean-Paul Clebert. So good the photos were that I was sharing them with my gypsy friend Ella May, who so delighted in them that she instantly ordered the book second-hand online. Such an olde way of life was portrayed, even through from not so far back, photos of gypsies dwelling in caves, travelling with bears and monkeys, which would dance to the beat of their tambourines, and such a beautiful photo of a young girl kissing the deity of Sara Kali at St Marie de la Mer.
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![]() My mothers ethnic DNA results were in. And, well, I have to say that they quite took me by surprise, because despite already having discovered that my own matriarchal DNA is exotic, the small exotic ethnic DNA percentages I have are not actually through her, but rather they are given to me by my father. She does not have them. The Middle Eastern, Anatolian and African are not at all from her. Our ancestresses leaving the matriarchal homelands, then, was in no way a recent event. What also surprises me is not only does she have less British DNA than me, but also less Viking. This means some of my Viking DNA has to come from my father. Her own Shetland blood must not have been pure Viking after all, but mixed with Pictish types/original island dwellers. The Spanish DNA is not from her, so is of my father. The French DNA, which overlaps into Northern Italy, is from her and she has a huge amount of it, 46%, almost half, which is certainly confusing to me. I only inherited 13% of the French-Italian from her, rather than 23%, sure proof there that what one inherits can be uneven and random and even differ among siblings. So it is that I can now make more sense, or maybe not much sense, of the origin of my own DNA. Oh, and I almost omitted it, that Eastern European I myself have at 1%, well, it comes through her, she having it at 2%. Her British is 35%, and her Scandinavian-Viking is 17%; really, with her inbred Shetlanders I would have expected more like 50% but not so. Having made assumptions about the family origins in light of DNA before, I am lax to go making any more assumptions. But I have to attempt to do so anyway. The huge amount of French-Italian she has, though seemingly equivalent to one of her parents, could rather come through two grandparents, for instance, Mary Ann Seagrove's black haired mother Maria Harrison, could have been Italian, and this would leave D'Auvergne Bane potentially bringing in some French. Even he has the name of a French department! Now, unless his Bane's and Bean's were from an interbreeding of French Huguenot settlers, not much watered down at all, then he could, as I have speculated before, have been adopted or an illegitimacy of his 'big sister' Alma's, and if this was connected after all with the D'Auvergne Barnards, all could make sense, as these colonials of India had, possibly, originated from France and the Channel Islands. By deduction I can speculate the origins more of my own father. Eileen Spencer's, his mother's own paternity, has always been a question mark, and with his British imput being more than my mothers, this would account for my pop George Harrison's Welsh and Forest of Dean, combined with my fathers mothers part Irish. This leaves a bundle of Spanish with rarer exotica and his Scandinavian. I am going to suppose here, with nanny Eileen Spencer having been so freckly fair, that her mystery father was a Scandinavian seaman, her mother having worked in the port; entirely guess work, of course. And I have even more guesswork. The London Maxted-Green-Roberts who I have contemplated previously to have gypsy heritage, well, it seems even more likely now, which would be why Iberian DNA is showing up. Gypsies are associated with a distant Indian tribe, and yet in all their travels did they not mix with locals of the lands they inhabited, did not runaways and people expelled from their own communities join them? Spanish, Anatolian, Middle Eastern, and somehow that bit of African added too... And if not the Maxteds, who may have been Old English mixture with Viking rather than gypsy, at least the Greens and Roberts are surnames associated with gypsy people. And, again, who knows where other illegitimacies have been? So, these are all my first thoughts anyway in trying to make sense of the matter. Certainly these latest results so amaze and give me much food for thought. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Familytree has perfected and updated its ethnic autosomal interpretations. And how crazy it is that, yes, before I was told I had some small Central Asian component, which is east of the Caspian Sea, which had got me all excited for its exotic appeal, but this has now been whacked back west and south of the Caspian to Armenia and Turkey. With a new ability to consider trace percentages I have been told I have Middle Eastern, that is the Levant, and Eastern European, both which I had not known of before. And whats more, to blow my mind all over again, I have some 2% Central South African! I almost feel, on being told this one day and that another day, that this science is too new even to be relied upon. Everything I have felt to believe is really fragile in this regard. And my matriarchal origin, is it really of the Caucasus, when it does seem that an Armenian link is arising, which is to the south of there. Anatolian Armenian Christian, this does appear quite possible. It could be this that has blended with the Levantine, and even the African, which has me confused of what to make of it all. The Africans could have been slaves in the Arab world, or from some past colonial interbreeding with locals. So many potentially fascinating stories are there which I will never know. And even this is not such a vast number of generations back. How exotic could it get, to know discover this ancestral connection to Africa, in the dark jungly south, where is Botswana, Angola, Zambia, and South Africa. And how watered down this is in me already, so pale and freckly, so very English looking. That black haired, ivory skinned ancestress in Greenwich, Maria Harrison; such a mystery resides within her. Was she a combination of Armenian, Levantine and African; is this why her distinct looks? My friend Deepak had once suggested she may be Armenian, with her un-British looks, and maybe he was indeed tuning into something. I need to locate the previous percentages that were given to me, to compare. I recall there had been Mediterranean, which has now been pinpointed to the Spanish peninsula. Other than which there is a whole connection to France, and/or its neighbouring lands, which I'd also not known of. British is naturally my main ethnic make-up with its Viking addition and of European there is in total 97%, though all then adds up to 105% and not 100%. The is the up to date percentages, then, which make up my autosomal ethnic mix: British Isles 55% Scandanavia 21% West & Central Europe 13% Spanish Peninsula 8% Turkey/Armenia 2% Eastern Europe 2% Levant (Asia Minor) 2% African (Central-South) 2% The Eastern European, which is from Poland to the Ukraine, is also a surprise. This is where the Ashkenazi Jews were located, so a link would be there, at least of having lived among them. This would concur with dreams I've had of being pursued by Nazi types and having to escape, and why I so feel to defend Jewish people who have known centuries of persecution even into modern times. Again, there could be an admixture into rarer types of peoples, via Ukraine, where indeed an ancient type of my matriarchal DNA has been found, as my friend Satshanti had recently pointed out to me. So, maybe my Eastern European type is indeed Ukrainian. With such a subject, all can only be guessed or assumed. These are but whispers of a past otherwise lost to us. But Africa, oh, Africa, how could I have know this was not just anciently the mother land, but something so much closer, still in my being. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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