Oh! I didn’t remember this option, that would be great!
By the way it was a test I did out of curiosity a few years ago, but I always ignore the notices of “new matches found” I receive from time to time, and almost forgot about it until today.
I went to have a look and turns out that one of my top three closest matches and estimated 2nd to 4th cousin, and blablabla (details just too complicated for me) has “Welsh” for surname. Go figure.
So now it turns out it’s a tiny bit of ancient DNA mysteriously attracting me to this language?
p.s. I don’t think so - but it’s kinda funny at this point!
The unexpected matches is exciting but so is finding out you’re not something you thought you could be. On my Mother’s side, a story exists of Native American, Cherokee ancestry. I’ve been told all my life I should be about 6.25% Cherokee. I even looked into University scholarships for Native Americans. The more I looked at my face, the more I realized, I don’t have a drop of Cherokee. And I was correct, 0% of Native American ancestry. When I told my Mom, she replied, “Well! That may be true for you, but I’m Cherokee!”
Agreed except neither she, nor my two sisters have any physical features that could be seen as “Native American.” I don’t know enough about genetics but I would think someone should have Native American physical attributes. Since my Mother is very adamant she had a Cherokee grandmother, we think there may have been a Cherokee woman who was a step-Grandmother.
But he would certainly have got the DNA which is where these results would come. If a DNA test shows 0% Cherokee then that would be true for mother too no matter how many times her father married Native Americans after she was born.
From what I remember each person has 23 PAIRS of chromosomes and you inherit half from each parent. So think about the chromosomes unzipping so for each there are four options And you could get any pair from the four.
For example with blood types O, A, B, and AB . To have A or B blood group one or other of your parents would be A, B or AB and you have AO or BO genes. To have AB blood each parent ihas at least one A or B gene. However, O blood group people must have two O blood group genes or OO genes as it is a recessive or weak gene. This means if you inherit A or B genes these override the O gene and you get A OR B blood group. So if your Mum is AO and your Dad is BO you have a one in four chance of being AO, BO OO or AB. You could be O BLOOD group and completely miss having an A or B gene.
Other weak genes are for red hair which can then pop up unexpectedly in a generation after several generations of brown hair has hidden the gene. 6% is very low on the scale of things so physical characteristics don’t necessarily show as they may be influenced by other genes
I’m no expert, but what I understood when I did test is that there’s "information"that can only be found/followed in lines of relatives of the same sex - therefore would not be visible in your test anyway.
Well, of course it’s also possible she was a step-Grandmother!
Yes, more complications. There is another sort of DNA which is not part of your chromosomes but held in each cells mitochondria. Your mitochondrial DNA comes straight from your mother doesn’t change hardly at all through the generations and can be traced to “The seven daughters of Eve”. You have the same as your mother regardless of your own sex.
Then if you are male you inherit your male y- chromosome from your father and a female x- chromosome from your mother, if female two x- chromosomes one from your father, one from your mother.
Also as Gisela says all irrelevant if talking about step-parents.
I’d just like to agree with everything that @jo-hornagold1 has said. Most DNA tests available today are on autosomal DNA - that’s the 22 pairs of chromosomes that are not X or Y. As explained above, you get half your autosomal DNA from your mother and half from your father, but that means that there is half of your mother’s DNA that you don’t get and half of your father’s DNA that you don’t get. If you have brothers and sisters then they will have inherited a different random selection of DNA. (Unless you have an identical twin.)
It is possible to have a test for mitochondrial DNA. As @jo-hornagold1 said, mitochondrial DNA comes from your mother (whether you are male or female) and is passed on practically unchanged.
Males can also have a test for Y chromosome DNA which is passed practically unchanged down the male line.
These latter two tests are less popular than they were, I think, now that the tests for autosomal DNA are so much better developed and widely used.
We seem to have strayed rather far from the original topic - sorry! This is a major interest of mine and I can go on indefinitely.
Oops, my fault for straying, but maybe we should start a Welsh DNA thread as this is very interesting and your knowledge and jo-hornagold1 exceeds my Mendel’s Pea Chart DNA level of information. I’ll add this one last interesting story. When I was researching about my “potential” Cherokee ancestry, it was interesting to discover that a lot of “White” American families claim they have Native American ancestry. Interestingly the vast majority state they have a “Cherokee Grandmother.” Reality is they do not; it’s a hopeful myth. Even 23&Me has a FAQ section about Native American ancestry and why it’s missing from your results. The short is answer is, “you don’t. Get over it.” HA!
I’m thinking about getting test kits for my Sisters for them to see as well. Mom does not want to be tested. It’s possible the DNA bypassed me, but I would think one of her children would receive a portion of the Cherokee DNA.
We should all go and speak Welsh to someone, even if it’s my American neighbor, because I’ve never asked if he does know Welsh. I’ll assume that he does.
Imagine the surprise on face of the Secretary of State for Wales, when attending an informal meeting of a local political association in deepest rural Wiltshire and I opened our conversation in Welsh! He responded, of course, immediately in Welsh and we followed it up later with an exchange of emails in Welsh - wrth gwrs!
I don’t want to get into the whole DNA thing - it’s complicated, and potentially controversial (although interesting). But I’ve recently been reading “The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650”, by John Morris. My copy has a copyright date of 1973, but it’s in the name of his wife, so I wonder if it was originally written somewhat earlier.
It’s an interesting, altohugh somewhat difficult book to read, partly because of its length (665 pages including index and appendices), but mostly because of its structure. It jumps about a bit, and also assumes some previous knowledge that I don’t have.
Anyway, he seems firmly of the opinion that there was no mass “ethnic cleansing” of native Britons by the so-called “Anglo-Saxons”, and I must say, this supports my own prejudice somewhat that the native Britons didn’t all flee from what became England, but quietly adopted the language and probably the cultural ways of the invaders.
However, there definitely was some emigration to Brittany (co-incidentally, we’ve just spent some days in north-east Brittany, so this was of more interest even that it might have been). He talks about there being three distinct waves of emigration, and it seems to have been the last one that had the most impact, in making that part of Gaul/France “little Britain beyond the sea”.
Surprising to me was the suggestion (if I am reading him correctly) most of the immigration might have come from Wales, rather than Cornwall, as I had supposed (especially since Breton is said to be closer to Cornish than Welsh).
Well, Wikipedia claims that most of them came from Cornwall and Devon. I’m not going to argue (but St Malo came from Wales - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malo_(saint) ).
I must re-read parts of that book to get a clearer idea of what he says about the immigration.
Bretons are mainly Catholic and the Christianisation occurred during the Roman Gaul and Frank era. During the Briton emigration to Brittany, several Christian missionaries, mostly Welsh, came in the region and founded dioceses. They are known as the “Seven founder saints”:
(Of the 7 listed, 6 seem to have come from Wales).
Now that’s interesting… I know absolutely nothing of the history myself, but I have a bilingual Cornish / English book for young readers — originally written in Breton by a Breton author — that’s about a boy and his family migrating to Brittany to escape the encroaching Saxons. I haven’t read the whole of it yet, but I was surprised to see the main characters all come from Wales and simply pass through Cornwall to get to their point of departure for the crossing to Brittany. I had also assumed the majority of Britons who settled in Brittany were Cornish. Maybe not… (Here’s the book, if anyone’s interested: https://www.thecornishstore.co.uk/product/vyaj-owen-owens-voyage/)
Well, refreshing my poor memory of geography by a brief look at the map, south Wales and north Cornwall and Devon are remarkably close, in the grand scheme of things, so from that point of view, emigrants were just as likely to be Welsh as Cornish; and possibly even travelled together.
One thing I did notice while in Brittany (and I had with me Henry Myhill’s book on Brittany from the late 60s - partly a travel book, but with some history mixed in), was that there was or had been a region of Brittany called Dumnonée, which comes from the old Roman name for Devon, and of course there was also a Cornouaille. So definitely some immigration from south-west England.
Gwir (true) — and back when most of the migration happened (the 400s-500s AD), I would assume the people of what are now Wales and Cornwall either still spoke the same language, or even if it had diverged by then, they would probably still have been speaking mutually intelligible dialects rather than separate languages as Welsh and Cornish are today.
I gather travel and trading links continued between Cornwall and Brittany for some centuries after that, because of the geographical closeness, whereas of course Wales is a lot further away from Brittany — so that might explain why the Cornish and Breton languages, as they developed, remained closer to each other than to Welsh. (Cornish shares about 80% of vocabulary (either the same or recognisably similar) with Breton and 75% with Welsh, I read somewhere; I don’t know what percentage is shared between Welsh and Breton, but I would guess it’s more like 65-70%. Our two sister languages have been very useful for filling in gaps in modern-day revived Cornish, by the way — if there’s a word we don’t have in the historical records of Cornish, and there’s a cognate between Breton and Welsh, we can figure out from those what the equivalent Cornish word should be. )
In the past, I have thought that if I ever studied a Celtic language, then it ought to be Cornish, as it’s the other “British” (i.e. within Britain) language. But my recent trip to Brittany has made me wonder whether it should not be Breton, after all. It is still a living language, in a more genuine sense than is Cornish (if I can say that without causing offence! ).
(There again, I have some Irish ancestry, so I really shouldn’t ignore Irish).
We were not in a Breton-speaking region by any stretch (we were near Dol, which is almost in Normandy). We visited St Malo (as well as Mont St Michel, which is definitely in Normandy), and also Rennes, an interesting city, formerly the capital of the region of Brittany, we learned, but definitely not Breton speaking (and hadn’t been for a long time, we gathered). Having said that, it was the one place where we saw bilingual street-name signs - quite interesting. I might post some pictures in another thread.
You can’t. No, seriously, I do understand the reasoning there. But it could equally well be argued that Cornish is the one that needs the most support in helping it to be a living language once again…
The Anglo-Saxon dominance was interrupted 300 years later when, during the Norman
conquest, the Saxon élite of Cornwall was replaced by a new ruling class from Brittany whose
language, Breton, was very similar to Cornish. However, the affluence of Bretons in their ancient
homeland is not only seen in the aristocracy sent by Normans, but also in the lower classes, since
wages in Cornwall were better than in Brittany. In fact, Bretons represent more than ten percent
of the population in some areas of Cornwall at this time (George 2009:489). Interestingly, some
scholars refer to this period of Cornish history as the “Armorican Return” (Mills 2010a:193).
Also related to the presence of Armoricans in Cornwall is a theory that links them with the origin
of the name for the Cornish language. According to Williams (2006:94), until the arrival of the
Armorican Bretons, people from Cornwall probably called their language Brethonek, but the
need to distinguish the insular Breton from the Continental Breton or Brezhoneg, might have
resulted in the creation of a new name, in this case Kernewek, which means “language of
Cornwall”. In spite of the waves of immigration, it is estimated that about three quarters of the
population of Cornwall were Cornish speakers at this time (Mills 2010a:195), with only a
marginal zone of about ten kilometres in the easternmost part of Cornwall inhabited by English
speakers.
As
No, seriously, I do understand the reasoning there. But it could equally well be argued that Cornish is the one that needs the most support in helping it to be a living language once again…