Basic Family Tree

Okay you've started on your family tree. You have the names of your cousins. aunts, uncles, grandparents, even some great-grandparents that you know came from Finland (where they love genealogy btw).    The convention for drawing a family tree are fathers on the left, mothers on the right.  A line directly connecting 2 people is a marriage or other kind of union.  Lines going down connect the children to the parents,  If there are more than one child, the line goes down to a horizontal bar, and lines descend from it to the children.

         You are the "you" in this family tree.  You know your paternal grandfather was born in Finland.  Your mother's parents, you know her father was a Polish Jew and her mother was part Hungarian.  But your Paternal Grandmother Susan, nobody knows anything about her background.

         Now lets go get DNA tested.  You buy the kit, swab your mouth or spit into a tube, send it in, WAIT 4 to 8 weeks to get the results back.

         Say you get these results:

          20% Finnish

          15% Ashkenazi Jewish

          15% East European

          10% Irish

          10% Native American

           9% Scandinavian

           8% Italy/Greece

           7% Iberian

           6% Great Britain

Hey, grandmother Susan might have been Native American.