Thursdays are for Genealogy

I was watching an old episode of Louis Henry Gates's PBS series "Finding Your Roots" last night, and after having been intrigued yet again by the pie charts he provides to each of his guests, thought I'd make something similar for myself.  I haven't done the DNA testing because barring unforseen circumstances (i.e., a parent not being the actual biological parent), I already know where most of my ancestors came from.  (Not all, though -- Addison A. Long, I'm talking to you!) 

Here is a fairly simple way to figure out the percentages of your heritage:

Multiply the number of foreign-born ...

... parents by 50.

... grandparents by 25.

... great-grandparents by 12.5.

... gg-grandparents by 6.25.

... ggg-grandparents by 3.125.

... gggg-grandparents by 1.5625.

... ggggg-grandparents by 0.78125.

Theoretically, you can go further back than this, simply by halving the multiplier, but obviously the percentages are going to get microscopically small very quickly. (Note again that this is not your genetic profile, but the much-more fluid cultural heritage; DNA is actually a random mix from each of your parents, and in turn a random mix from their parents, and so on, so that there is actually a 1 in 64 chance that you inherited no DNA at all from your gg-grandparent instead of the 1/16th you would expect from simple math.  It can get complicated.  Gates's charts are DNA-based percentages.)

Here is an example using my mom, whose pie chart is at the top of this post -- her family has that amazing American characteristic of immigration ranging from pre-Revolution to fairly recent.  I use only the immigrant ancestors for these calculations; obviously, the parents of a German-born ancestor will probably (but not always, of course) be German-born.  Both of my mom's parents were American-born, so I skip that step, and that of her grandparents, who were also all American-born.  Two of her great-grandparents were German-born, and one was a Scot.  Two of her gg-grandparents were German-born.  One of her ggg-grandparents was Swiss.  Five of her gggg-grandparents were German.  Two of her ggggg-grandparents were Moravian, seven were German, and three were Swiss.  (This last is one of the places where the figures are a bit misleading, partly because I'm using only immigrant ancestors to do the calculations, and partly because the term "Moravian" can refer to people from Moravia or to the religious group, or in Mom's case both.  Her ancestors who came from Moravia -- and also happened to be some of the early members of the Moravian Church -- were her 5th-great-grandparents, so their percentage in the chart below is very small, but her father was culturally almost completely Moravian (since most of his German and Swiss ancestors were also part of the church) -- so Mom's Moravian heritage is 1.5625% or as much as 50%, depending on how you look at it!)

Now I do the math ...

Then I add the like percentages together, all of the Germans, all of the Swiss, and so on.  This gives me German = 50.78125%, Scottish = 12.5% Swiss = 5.46875%, and Moravian = 1.5625%.  The "other" is probably German or Swiss,  and English.

Word has a pie-chart maker, so all I have to do is plug in the numbers and decide which color scheme I want.  The chart maker rounds up the numbers to the nearest whole, and apparently also adjusts them so that the total is 100%.

My dad's ancestry is noticeably different, as his immigrant ancestors were almost all much more recent, six out of his eight great-grandparents.  Here is his pie chart -- I list Germans and Bavarians separately because it amuses me, Bavarians being famously nationalistic --

Comments

[mary lou]

Have you listened to any of the BBC podcast Germany Memories of a Nation? It's really well done and I've learned a lot. Like why you might set the Bavarian and the German up as separate categories.

[Berva]

So where does my dad's Czech ancestry fit in? Or possibly they were German but living in Prague as my dad's father said that his family were from the Prague area?

Mom