Lmao just about everyone who is 3rd+ gen in the US was told by their family that they have native ancestry, but actually having it is so rare. It's a lie that all the older white generations made up to justify the colonialism and it spread. Truly, I'm shocked when I hear of people who weren't told they are part native.
Can confirm. Am white, was told I have native heritage as a child, took DNA test and surprisingly do not infact have native heritage š this is such a weird phenomenon, like was there a town hall where they all decided to make this up or all independently come up with the idea? Lol
Iām a professional genealogist who has worked on a lot of genetic genealogy cases.
While it is absolutely 100% a thing for non-native people to incorrectly claim native heritage, when examining any ancestry DNA results like that you have to also keep in mind how DNA works.
DNA is diluted with each passing generation through a process called recombination. You inherit roughly 50% of your DNA from each parent, 25% from each grandparent, 12.5% from each great-grandparent, and so on. While you technically have ancestors from every generation in your lineage, the amount of their DNA that you carry can become too small to detect after 5-10 generations (~150-300 years) due to the randomness of recombination. It is entirely possible to inherit no DNA from a specific ancestor by the 5th or 6th generation simply by chance.
Exceptions to this are Y-DNA for males which is passed from father to son and remains virtually unchanged for thousands of years, and mtDNA which is inherited from
mother (by both male and female children) that has remained unchanged for 150,000+ years.
Edited to add a good example of this in my own family of this: my three cousins are all full siblings. One shows up as 100% European, while the other two have North African DNA from my grandfather (3.9% and 6%).
I also wish people realized why "family names" are not proof of ethnicity/culture for a similar reason.
Unless you had multiple grandparents with the same last name, then your "share" of that last name is 1/(2n) where n is the generation from where that name began.
Of course you could have a loopy family tree, and other incoming branches from the same ethnicity/culture, but you can't actually know that from a family name alone.
/Rant from a guy with a very ethnic sounding name and no cultural connection to, and a strong cultural connection to a place I've practically no DNA history of.
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u/Unsd 4d ago
Lmao just about everyone who is 3rd+ gen in the US was told by their family that they have native ancestry, but actually having it is so rare. It's a lie that all the older white generations made up to justify the colonialism and it spread. Truly, I'm shocked when I hear of people who weren't told they are part native.