How A DNA ethnicity test made me realize I’m American

But for a select few of us, we get the question “What are you?” For me, this has always been a frustrating question because my grandfather, in his explanation for an unknown answer, always told me we were “Heinz 57.”

My mom, on the other hand, completed her family tree. On both sides, her family has only been in America for four generations, and she is made up of only three nationalities — German, Irish, and English. She definitely looks it: at 5 foot 3 inches, she is blue-eyed and auburn-haired and her pale, freckled skin reacts immediately to any sun exposure.

I was born with curly strawberry blonde hair that faded to sun-kissed brown in my teens, almond-shaped green eyes with a dabble of brown in the center, and medium beige skin. Though of average height, I stand tall with an athletic figure. I look a lot more like my dad and brother — though my dad is very tall, and they both have darker skin than me.

Because of my looks, people I grew up with in Michigan sometimes called me “exotic looking.” People on the East Coast routinely ask whether I’m Italian, Jewish, or Middle Eastern.

I would always shrug and smile. Then I tried to search for an answer that could explain my differentness. My uncommon British last name and German-Irish-English maternal heritage were simply no help at all.

First, I tried to make a family tree for my dad’s side. But I only got about five generations back when names stopped being consistent, either because my relatives were illiterate or were going by aliases and nicknames. But as far back as I could get, all of those family members were born where my dad grew up — Flint, Michigan.

Putting it to the test

My last resort was a DNA ethnicity test, which my parents got me for Christmas — it was $99 from Ancestry.com. A vial of spit and couple of months later, I was provided with the results. I am 31 percent Western European, 29 percent British, 16 percent Irish, 12 percent Eastern European, 7 percent Scandinavian, and 5 percent Iberian Peninsula.

It was fun to sort through family lore when I got my test results back. My paternal grandmother had said she was Swedish. I looked up her maiden name, Root, and discovered that its origin is Normandy. While Normandy is a region in France, it was a Viking settlement. Made sense because my grandmother was extremely tall for a woman and had blondish hair.

I even looked up my mother’s Irish maiden name and found that the family motto has the word “veritate” in it, which is a variation of a word I’ve always inexplicably been drawn to — I have a couple jewelry items adorned with the word. It felt cool to have a familial connection with a word that means so much to me.

Meanwhile, I still can’t necessarily explain why I look “ethnic” based off my test results. Sure, I am 12 percent Eastern European. But based off the map I got with my results, that could mean anywhere from Poland to Romania to Greece. And perhaps my tiny bit of Spanish or Portuguese really came out strongly in my features. I’ll probably never be able to know anything about those two pieces to my heritage, since I have no way of making sense of it through family lore or public records.

Identity crisis resolved

Instead, I've come to a conclusion — I am really, truly an American. I always felt my culturelessness made me bland, but it shows that my family did what they came to America to do — live in and assimilate to this society. America is all about being a melting pot of cultures and people, since immigrants flooded over here to escape oppression. I just happen to be a melting pot in one single person.

But you don’t have to be an English-speaking white person to be an American. A bilingual, half-Mexican, half-European person is also the definition of American. And so is a Chinese person who was naturalized here. All that makes you American is to choose to live here and be around all different kinds of people.

So, yeah, maybe my DNA ethnicity test didn’t bring about any satisfying cultural claim. I have no clue what any of it — even the things that were not complete surprises — means. But I learned to love all of those cultures I’m made up of. I love the way I look. I love my family for deciding to come here and mix with different kinds of people. Most of all, I love the fact that I get to be around so many different kinds of people who aren’t like me but share one thing — we are American, and this is where we want to be.