I'm WHAT?

My Ancestry.com DNA test results arrived in my email this morning -- and I was very surprised to see that the dominant region my ancestors came from was Ireland, followed by "Europe West" and Scandinavia, as I thought my known* ethnic heritage was a mix of Scottish, English, Welsh, Northern Irish, and German.

I've spent a little time most of this afternoon reviewing details of my family tree, which has a number of ancestors who came to the United States from Germany, Scotland, Wales, England, and even a few from France, beginning in the late 1600s and continuing throughout the 1700s.

My maternal grandmother's grandfather, who died long before she was born, is the line through which we thought we had a connection to the St. Clairs/Sinclairs of Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh, which several members of our extended family, including me, have visited. Alexander St. Clair (1793-1862), a merchant from Saintfield, County Down, near Belfast, came to Virginia in about 1837. The following year, at age 44, he married a woman 21 years his junior, with whom he had nine children, four of whom died very young. Their youngest surviving child was my grandmother's father -- was he the one who told my grandmother and her siblings about Rosslyn Chapel, or was it his older siblings? We'll probably never know.

Now I absolutely must stop and get some other things done. I'm left with many more questions about my ancestors than I had before that email came, but even if I do have very little Scottish blood, the sound of bagpipes moves me deeply! And I've always wanted to visit Ireland...

*I know almost nothing about my father's family, as he told us very little about them and died when I was 12. I've only recently begun to research that side of my family online, and so far, all of the ancestors I've identified were born and died in the United States.

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