Making Sense of Your DNA Results

I bought my DNA test from ancestry.com about five years ago, fairly soon after they made it available, and my pie chart was a bit of a shock. I've traced my ancestors back to the late 1600s, and they always lived in southern Italy. So the 44% Middle Eastern just seemed crazy.

My original pie chart and ethnicity
estimate from ancestry.com.

As time went on and more and more people submitted their DNA, the database became more robust and greater refinements were made. So now my chart is 75% Italian/Greek, and just a bit of other things. The 44% Middle Eastern is now 7%. That's a dramatic difference. So, if you get a DNA test, keep checking back for more information.

My current pie chart from ancestry.com.

But if my ancestors were in southern Italy in the 1600s, how do I have any Middle Eastern or European Jewish DNA? Your DNA can have its origins from a thousand or more years ago, and if you think about it, the southern Italians, Europeans, and many other populations did not originate in those places thousands of years ago.

They had to come from somewhere. And what did we learn in grade school social studies? That Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization. That everything began where the Tigris meets the Euphrates. That's modern day Iraq.

If you look at my ethnicity map and see that Italian peninsula, it doesn't seem the least bit far-fetched to think that at some point people migrated from the Middle East to the Mediterranean Sea and up into Europe. And even a little research bears this out.

In the history of things, this area isn't too spread out.

Results from Family Tree DNA

It's important to understand that your DNA can be different than your sibling's DNA because of the somewhat random way in which it's passed down. You have 16 great grandparents, but you will not inherit an equal amount of DNA markers from each of them. That explains why I've got more Italian DNA than my own mother.

I received a great tip at a genealogy seminar that I'll pass along to you.

If you had your DNA tested somewhere, you should be able to download the data. You can upload that data to Family Tree DNA and have another way to connect with people who may be your distant relatives. Naturally they gave me different, and less specific percentages! Now I'm looking Turkish again, but hey. The Italians had to come from somewhere originally.

What's Napoleon Got to Do With Italy?

As I continue downloading thousands of birth, marriage and death records from my grandpa Iamarino's hometown in Italy, I find that the online archive I'm using has each town's documents split into three categories. These are worth explaining to anyone with Italian ancestors.

I live on this website 24/7 now.

From 1806 to 1815 the communities of Italy were required to keep official documentation of births, marriages and deaths. Before this period your best source of such information is handwritten church documents. The requirement was known as the Stato Civile Napoleonico (Napoleonic Civil Registration). During this period of time, Italy and many regions were under the rule of imperial France, so, you know, all hail Napoleon.

The period of time between 1815 and 1865 was known as Stato Civile della Restaurazione (Civil State of the Restoration) when ruling authorities in different parts of Italy also required formal record keeping for births, marriages and deaths. During this time Italy was not a single, united country, but a collection of kingdoms and city-states.

Italy became a unified country in 1861 under the leadership of King Victor Emmanuel, although for several more years a handful of wars resulted in annexations to form the Italy we now know. The country issued a decree at the end of 1865 calling for Stato Civile Italiano (Italian Civil Registration) which continued the practice of keeping meticulous records. And I want to thank them sincerely.

So that explains the excellent documentation and the way they are categorized and stored.

Italy is subdivided into 20 regions, each containing a few provinces (96 total), which contain cities (città metropolitane), municipalities (comuni), and hamlets (frazioni).

You can compare Italy's regions to states, and its provinces and counties. Lucky me. All of my ancestors are from the same county.

Collect the Whole Set!

It's been my experience that anyone who becomes involved in genealogy becomes obsessed with genealogy. We each have our areas of focus. Some people spend years trying to go back another generation in one troublesome branch of their tree. Others concentrate on the males only, climbing the tree one generation at a time. Me? I want everything. Everything!

When I started my tree, all I knew about my mother's father's family were his siblings' names (Eve and Noah to his Adam!) and that his mother might have been named Mariangela (she wasn't). But I wanted to know more. First I wrote to the webmaster for his town's website and he was kind enough to send me my grandfather's parents' names, birth dates and marriage date, as well as the birth dates of his siblings. Then I began ordering microfilm through the Family History Center of the vital records from his hometown in Italy.

Armed with my great grandparents' names and birth dates, I was able to locate their birth records and learn their parents' names. During that search I found other names that may have been siblings to my great grandparents.

That's when I knew I had to document all the records (1809–1860) for the entire town to see exactly how they all fit together. In the end, this long process yielded about 12,000 people for my family tree.

Twelve thousand people.

The whole time I worked on that project, which was about five years, all I kept thinking about was how much I wanted to do the same for my other grandfather's town—the town my maiden name comes from. But work got in the way, and I no longer had the freedom to go view microfilm at my local Family History Center during their limited hours. I kept hoping that my other grandfather's town's records would be digitized and made available on familysearch.org, but it didn't happen.

Then I discovered an Italian website that has the vital records for all of my ancestral hometowns! So now it begins again. I am meticulously downloading every single birth, marriage and death document from the town of Colle Sannita, ranging from 1809–1942 with a few gaps. That's a lot of documents.

As I download them, I make note of two key last names: that of my grandfather (Iamarino) and his mother (Pilla). Once I have them all I will begin:

• transcribing the basic facts into a spreadsheet,
• entering confirmed relatives into my Family Tree Maker file,
• piecing together every relative in the town.

Today my tree has more than 19,000 people. (I told you I'm obsessed.) After this project, I should hit 30,000. That's a great start, don't you think?