So my husband has been fascinated with finding out his cultural origin for as long as I have known him, and without much success. I have been researching my own family history since college, mostly using grave marker and a few genealogies that contain my families history. Since my family’s past is better documented, I have had great success utilizing both free and paid services to gather a impressive family tree going back a few hundred years but nothing that indicates where my family came from before living in North America in the 1600-1700s. There are family stories that place my ancestors as French and French Canadian with some Slavic and other Eastern European thrown in, not nothing definitive that I have found.
In the past two years my husband has been interested in seeing who his ancestors are, and where they came from, so he started asking me to research back through his family line. Using Ancestory.com, I was able to trace his paternal line back a few hundred years and cover most of the branches of his family three generations back from his grandparents. But none of that put him any closer to finding out his origins.
After seeing the recent surge of DNA testing to find ancestral markers, he was hooked and today we got our DNA collection kits in the mail. He was not expecting to have to spit in a tube, thinking it would be check swabs, but it turned out to be less time consuming than he thought. So we collected the samples, and enclosed them for mailing, hoping to hear back in a few weeks and I will be posting what we find out then.
Have you or someone you know done a DNA test or genealogy research? Was it for fun, or to discover personal family history?
