Crucianize

Tag: Fête dés Pères

  • Phasing My 23andme With My Father

    Hello there!

    As you guys have read about before here, here, and here. I took the 23andme test in June 2018 and got my results back on July 18, 2018. I was left very underwhelmed, there was not much to learn from the results.

    Take a look for yourself:

    Over 100€ for that, I thought my brother’s Ancestry test was much more informative. It was fine though, a couple of months after there was an update and it broke down the African. It still wasn’t the best but at least it wasn’t just West African anymore. My .3% African Hunter-Gatherer was gone while Nigerian, Senegambian & Guinean, Congolese, and Sudanese were separated from the broad West African category. Coastal West African while narrowed down from just West African is still a broad category not to mention the Broadly West African, Broadly Congolese & Southern East African, and Broadly Sub-Saharan African. Just a lot of Broadly.

    My European stayed mostly the same. Scandinavian at .4% was added send it made sense since my brother had Norway and Sweden which I assumed came from my Father’s mother. My grandmother’s family has been in the Danish West Indies since the first slaves were brought there. There’s also a mulatto ancestor with the surname Boldt, I admit it’s not much evidence but a cousin who descended from that same line also has Norway and Sweden. Unfortunately, Ancestry DNA doesn’t have a Chromosome browser so I can’t see where that Norway and Sweden are located and if my brother and this cousin match on that same chromosome. Since doing my research on my grandfather’s place of birth Saint-Barthélemy, I realized that Swedish could come from that side since the Swedish colonized the Island from 1784 to 1877.

    I should note that my African went up and my European went down, not by much but I found it interesting nonetheless. My Native American stayed the same and I gained Western Asian and North African.

    In May 2019 my results went through another update, they called this a Beta update, my African portion was broken down, even more, I lost the Sudanese but gained Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean, the Congolese & Southern East African got a break down showing Angolan & Congolese but there were still those pesky Broadly categories.

    My European had a revamp, the Iberian category was renamed to Spanish & Portuguese, I lost the little bit of Italian I had. My Native American once again stayed the same. Strangely, I had Central & South Asian added at 0.1%, seeing how categories at that level seem to vanish I didn’t expect to see it at the next update.

    Now we’re at my most recent update before I phased with my father. It was updated around September 2019 but if you remember I was pregnant and sick during that time so I didn’t see the update until April of this year. My African Hunter-Gatherer is back at the same percentage too. Southern East African was added at .1%. My Western Asian & North African went up. I had a location for France, Nouvelle-Aquitaine which lines up perfectly with my paper trail, and I had a Caribbean location Dominica, which is right on the money since both my Mother’s parents were from there.

    For Father’s Day, I decided I was going to buy my father a 23andme kit, it wasn’t a surprise since I had spoken to both parents about it and they were interested, my father got his kit in July and his results were ready earlier this month. I’m not going to lie but I didn’t expect anything in his composition other than European and African. What he received shocked me.

    My father apparently has Native American ancestry. Never in my life has anyone ever mentioned him having Native American anywhere in any of his family lines and since both his parents have passed I have no one to ask about it and will probably never find out where it comes from. Even better?

    My Native American comes from him. All my life I was told my Mother’s mother had Kalinago ancestry and when I saw Native American in my composition I assumed it came from my Grandmother, jokes on me though, it could have come from a Grandmother, just not the one I thought.

    My Father has two regions in France and six in the United Kingdom. Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie line up perfectly with our paper trail but all the United Kingdom regions are a mystery.

    Here are my results after phasing with my father. My African Hunter-Gatherer is gone once again. Italian has reappeared. My West Asian & North African has gone down again, this time they are trace ancestry.

    I guess my course of action now is to test my Mother and see what secrets her DNA is hiding.

  • The Fathers in my Life

    Today is Father’s Day, a day I usually don’t care for because of my own weird relationship with my father, so, today I’m going to talk about the many father figures I’ve had in my life and how they lead me to the father in my children’s lives.

    My Father

    Me and my father 1987-1988

    My father is not an easy man to understand, some days you wonder if he even cares, I’ve spoken a bit about this in The Useless Sibling and the truth is it was so much worse, the other day someone asked me what was the best feature of my father that I looked for in a man and I just couldn’t think of one. Almost everything I thought of was something I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be treated as a mistake in my partner’s life and I sure as hell didn’t want him to view or children as playthings for his public persona. That saying that a father is a girl’s, first love? Not even close to being true for me.

    Two of my most vivid memories are of my parents fighting, one where my mother was going to leave the house and had her keys in her hand and my father grabbed her arm and was pulling it like he was going to break it, I jumped on his back and started pummeling him while I yelled for my brothers, my oldest brother came with a broomstick and my father finally let go of our mother. The second incident I don’t remember as well but I remember my mother bitting into his arm and he was hitting her in the head trying to get her loose.

    These were just two extremes but they fully cemented in my head that I didn’t want a relationship like this. I didn’t want a man like this, I wasn’t even sure I ever wanted to get married, all the marriages in my life save one was toxic, cheating, children on the outside, fighting, just a lot of toxicity.

    Uncle Luis

    Now I’ll talk about that one good marriage in my life, one of my mother’s sisters, Aunty Cathy, married my Uncle Luis, from the very first time I remember meeting him he has always been very nice to me. With my Selective Mutism, I didn’t speak to him, I remember feeling very shy around him for a long time but that didn’t change how he treated me, he would talk to me, show interest in my drawings, try my failed attempts at sodas haha, he did everything my father didn’t. My uncle out of everyone in my life is who I based the ideal mate on. My aunt and uncle lived with us for a while and those were good days, I felt heard and seen, I had a good male figure in my life and he treated my aunt really well.

    The day they moved out was one of the saddest in my life, it meant I would go back to being ignored or yelled at for just existing. Even though he no longer lived with us I never forgot the way my uncle treated me, I would look forward to their visits every time.

    My Husband

    Before I met my husband I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married or have children, I was pretty content in the fact that I would be single Aunty Lynnette, the cool and strict aunt. For whatever reason, my cousins believed I was a traveling girl? Meaning that I had many boyfriends and several sexual encounters. That couldn’t be farther from the truth, I didn’t do much as kiss a guy until my husband.

    I mean sure I had lots of male friends but they were just friends, I also didn’t meet any of them in real life, my mother says I’m pretty unobservant because a lot of them were flirting with me but I never noticed it? I like my friends, they’re good men but not for me, they weren’t like my uncle none of the guys I met were like my uncle so definitely not someone I would be interested in forming a permanent bond with.

    I spoke a bit about how I ended up with my husband in My Truths. Before we even had children I saw how he was with his niece and how he was with my nieces, it reminded me so much of my beloved uncle and they were both tall and wore glasses, if this wasn’t the universe talking to me I don’t know what it was.

    Marvin and Chacha

    One of my nieces was so taken with Marvin that she started calling him Daddy, I routinely call her his first child haha, I have to say that even though I was determined to find a man nothing like my father, Marvin and my father shared several similar tastes and qualities. I somehow found a man that was a balance between my father and my uncle.

    The most notable quality between my father and Marvin? Determination. I swear I’ve never seen two people who would never give up until they have accomplished what they set out to do.