I’ve done my family tree going back to the 1500s on Ancestry.com as well as had a DNA test done via 23andMe which results I’ll include here. My father’s ancestors migrated to North America from Norway, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, France (after living in Quebec for a couple generations), and Belgium mostly in the 1700s, some in the early 1800s. My mother’s ancestors migrated here from England, Germany, and Ireland in the 1700s. This is important to my family because it tells us where we come from. I don’t know if any were in the military or had anything to do with founding the United States but a lot of my ancestors started off either in Quebec, Canada or the east coast, New England- mainly Pennsylvania and New York. I think my family’s story is common among white Americans. Most are European whose ancestors have been here for at least a couple hundred years. I have no idea what it would be like to move your entire life to a whole new country, but from the stories I’ve heard about Ellis Island it couldn’t have been easy. According to my 23andMe results, Irish is my most abundant nationality, followed by Scandinavian (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish), then Spanish/Portuguese, Eastern European (Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Russia), then “Broadly Northwestern European” which would include France and Scandinavian countries. I have no clue where the Eastern European DNA came from because there are some missing pieces in my family tree but I plan to keep working on it until it’s complete.

– Jordan Newton

Relationship:  Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more