Irish genealogy, DNA, and my adoption

December 11, 2014 11:06 AM

Irish genealogy, DNA, and my adoption
I was adopted, and for most of my life all I knew was that my biological parents were English and Irish. A year ago I took a DNA test, and sudden I know a lot more: Who my biological mother was (and the amazing coincidences between our lives), what percentage of my DNA is Neanderthal, and the complexities of Irish identity, ethnicity and genetics.

Role: author

posted by maxsparber (5 comments total)

Well that last link is weird. You might remember this FPP, which you commented in... if the claims in the FPP were accurate it almost makes me wonder whether someone somewhere mixed up "British" and "Anglo-Saxon" and that's why Ancestry is telling people they have negligible British DNA.

Tangentially, it's only in the last couple of years that I learned about Doggerland—evidently in the vicinity of the "7,000 years ago" Britannia major (and maybe Ireland?) would've been connected to Continental Europe?
posted by XMLicious at 2:30 PM on December 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

What a gift, that your biological mother wrote so much... and such cool stuff, too!
posted by Scram at 2:32 PM on December 14, 2014

Do I recall that you were raised Jewish? Or did you convert later? I was under the impression that especially with babies from Irish Catholic mothers, they tried to keep them with Irish Catholic families. (My ex-husband's mother's family was like this -- five kids, all from different mothers, but all Irish living with Irish.)
posted by Madamina at 5:48 PM on December 14, 2014

I was raised Jewish. My biological mother was then a Quaker with decidedly new age leanings. Her only stipulation was that I not be adopted by anybody in Duluth, where she had lived in her teen years and apparently did not enjoy it.
posted by maxsparber at 7:54 AM on December 15, 2014

Kinship by Design is a history of 20th-century adoption in the US and includes information about the historic development of ethnicoreligious-affiliated adoption-placement organizations. One interesting thing I learned from the book that has tangential bearing on Bunny's experience is that for whatever reason, historically there are few children of Jewish ethnicity made available for adoption, which means there are usually more parents of Jewish ethnicity seeking to adopt than same-heritage kids available. This was a source of controversy last century for reasons which are transparently inferrable.
posted by mwhybark at 11:56 AM on January 3, 2015