Article content
Three years ago, I signed up for Ancestry.com’s AncestryDNA service, having been drawn in by the company’s TV ads. You might remember the most famous one, in which a white-appearing woman named Kim burbled about how she’d learned she was 16 per cent Native-American.
Alas, when my own test results came back, they showed I was about as multicultural as the appetizer list at Snowdon Deli. The included Ancestry.com map showed a bunch of orange dots clustered densely in Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Hungary basically a map of pre-Holocaust Jewish Europe each corresponding to an “ancestral community” statistically associated with my DNA. To the south, my most exotic ancestors were Romanians. In the north, the farthest my forebears made it was Denmark. Turns out I was exactly who I thought I was: a boring white guy descended from Ashkenazi Jews.
United-states
United-kingdom
Canada
American
British
Canadian
Shannon-webb-campbell
Connie-legrande
Joseph-boyden
Steven-galloway
Jesse-wente
Michelle-latimer