See what you can learn today about your DNA and family history.
Happy St. Patricks Day!
or, in Gaelic:
Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh!
This is the time of year when many Americans wear "Kiss me, I'm Irish" t-shirts, green hats with shamrocks on them, and have parties with green beer.
Why not find out more about your Irish roots while your Irish soda bread bakes? In this newsletter, I've included several posts that can help you discover your Irish heritage through DNA and genealogy:
If you scroll down, you can read more about these posts. Just click on the title or the image to go to my site to read the complete article. Plus, you can always check back during the week for new posts.
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Until next time,
Mercedes
PS This issue of my newsletter is dedicated to Saint Patrick, Ireland, and my most recent Irish ancestor, David Dougherty. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h'anam.
Are you interested in finding out if you have Irish roots? You aren’t the first person to wonder “How to find out if I am Irish?”, and luckily, there is are two relatively easy ways to find out if you have recent Irish ancestors. In this post, I’ll explain the different ways to find out if you are Irish – just in time for St. Patty’s Day this year. You just might be wearing your “Kiss me, I’m Irish” t-shirt with confidence… who knew?
If you just got your DNA results back and you found out that you have the Ireland and Scotland DNA ethnicity on your results, you can count yourself among the descendants of the more than ten million people who have emigrated from Scotland and Ireland since the 1700s.
If you did a DNA test expecting to find more Irish, or at least some Irish, represented in your ethnicity results, you are not alone. Many people are surprised to find Irish, and others are surprised not to find Irish in their DNA. With St. Patrick’s Day coming up in just a few weeks, you might be asking if you can still be Irish even though you have none in your DNA results. And if you can be Irish – without showing an ounce of Irish in your DNA – how can you know how Irish you really are?
When I was growing up, I knew very little about my mom’s paternal side of the family. Supposedly, my maternal grandfather’s dad was Slovak, and his mother was “Scotch-Irish”. The term “Scotch-Irish” acquired a little bit of a mystic flavor to me since no one seemed to be to about to tell me, definitively, who the Scotch-Irish were, and why they came to the United States. In this post, we’ll explore the Scotch-Irish and try to understand what brought them to America – and how they might have ended up in your family tree.
If you have Mexican ancestry and have already done a DNA test, or are thinking about doing one, you might be surprised to know that many people with Mexican roots have Irish DNA. There is a lot of misinformation out there about the “typical” genetic makeup of the average Mexican. In fact, most people typically expect to find only “Spanish” and Native American, and are shocked to know that it’s really common to find signs of Irish ancestors tucked within your DNA.
