There's always something about finding those people with whom your words, actions, and even preferences just resonate. Some friends of mine used to joke about that as finding "my people." In the case of my recent—and feverish—chase to learn more about my Polish ancestry, I've since discovered that "Polish" might not necessarily be "my people" after all. Digging even deeper into the history of a place as foreign to me as Poland, I've learned that I might not exactly be Polish, after all. That's what we learn when we dig deeper into the concept of ethnicity.
In my case, I had first learned that my paternal roots came from a region known as Pomerania, a place with its own identity and certainly with its own history. From that point, however, I've since discovered that there may have been other separate and distinct people groups in that same region, with their own history, language, and culture.
With genealogy businesses like Ancestry and MyHeritage recently releasing updated versions of their DNA ethnicity updates, I was curious to see whether either of those companies had sniffed out the differences in these population groups from the northern portion of what is now the country of Poland. After all, using DNA testing to examine our ethnic heritage is a technique specific to the twenty first century. I wanted to see whether the refining of those reference populations might reveal anything to confirm what I was finding in the historical record for the area.
This week, as I work my way behind the scenes, building the family trees for descendants of my ancestors' collateral lines, we'll talk about those historic ethnic groups and examine the likelihood that the migrations of centuries past may have been reflected in the tale told today by DNA test results.
No comments:
Post a Comment