I’m a few steps closer to a Heinz 57
I was at a loss for a column topic this week when, on a whim, I logged into Ancestry.com to see whether its latest DNA update had arrived.
It had. Serendipity is always welcome on deadline.
For those of us who have taken one of these tests, Ancestry’s annual updates have become a curious little ritual. You know, going in, that your DNA has not changed. The spit you sent in years ago remains the same spit. The chromosomes did not rearrange themselves overnight. No forgotten great-great-grandparent suddenly decided to move from Scotland to Denmark.
And yet, when the update appears, the story can change anyway.
In my case, the newest interpretation now connects my DNA to 24 different regions. I am almost halfway to claiming the Heinz 57 label.
That number would have surprised the version of me who first took an Ancestry DNA test in 2018. At the time, I was simply trying to learn more. As an adoptee, I had already researched what I could about my birth parents. I knew there were family ties to Portugal and Germany, but much of the biological side of my story was still a blank map.
The first results were interesting, but also puzzling. They showed only 10 percent Portuguese ancestry, which seemed low given what I already knew from genealogy. My birth father’s grandfather had been a whaler from the Azores, and his wife was from there, too. Portugal was not some vague family rumor.
Over time, the science has moved closer to that paper trail. In the 2023 test I took after losing access to my original account, Portuguese ancestry showed up at 37 percent. In the latest update, the Azores alone account for 40 percent, with another one percent from Madeira. That doesn’t feel like a discovery, it feels like a correction, as if the technology finally caught up with the family story.
That is part of what makes these updates so fascinating. They are not really changes in ancestry. They are changes in interpretation.
The basic idea is that companies like Ancestry compare pieces of our DNA to reference panels, made up of people whose families have long histories in particular places or populations. As those panels grow, and as the analysis improves, the company can sometimes make finer distinctions. England, for me, becomes southeastern England, Devon and Somerset, East Midlands and Yorkshire, northern England, and West Midlands.
That is why a DNA estimate is both defining and transient. It can point toward real history, but it is still a map drawn from current evidence. And maps get redrawn more often than Congressional districts.
My Indigenous ancestry is a good example. Across the years, the percentage has remained fairly steady, around six or seven percent. The question has always been where it leads.
At one point, Ancestry identified a possible connection to Baja California and the southern California coast. Later, that specificity disappeared, replaced by a much broader Indigenous Americas-Mexico category that covered a wide sweep of geography. Now the Baja California Peninsula has returned as a specific region.
Whether that points toward one family line I’ve traced or somewhere else entirely, I don’t know. For now, it mostly reminds me how a steady percentage can still leave the human story just out of reach.
Then there is Cameroon.
In my first test, a small African component was identified as Cameroon/Congo. Later updates broadened that ancestry into other Sub-Saharan African regions. This year, it has returned to Cameroon, at two percent.
Two percent may sound small, and statistically it is. But the note attached to it made it feel much larger. Ancestry indicated that I share DNA with at least one person in its reference panel who comes from one of two ethnic groups, Nso or Wimbum.
That stopped me.
Most of these results are abstractions. They are percentages, regions, shaded areas on a map. But here was language that pointed, however indirectly, toward an actual person. Not an ancestor I can name, not a relative I can contact, but still, someone living or recently living whose DNA helped identify this small piece of my own.
I found myself wondering who that person is. Where they live. What their family knows about its own history. Whether some distant, tangled route through the Atlantic, perhaps through slavery in Mexico and intermarriage with Indigenous people there, could explain how that ancestry became part of me.
I do not know. I may never know. But there is a difference between reading “two percent” and thinking, “a person.”
The newest update also includes something I had not seen before in my results: one percent Sephardic Jews in Northern Africa. Sephardic Jews trace their origins to Jewish communities in Spain and Portugal, many of whom later settled in North Africa and elsewhere.
Given the Portuguese side of my ancestry, the appearance of that category is intriguing. It does not tell a complete story. It barely tells the first sentence of one. But it opens another small window onto the movement of people, cultures, faiths, and families across time.
Not every update feels like an addition. Some feel like a subtraction, even when I know better.
In 2023, my results included 15 percent Sweden and Denmark. I liked that. Living now on the Iron Range, where Swedish immigrants were among the early arrivals and Danish families later added their own threads to the region’s story, it gave me a small sense of belonging to the place I had chosen as home.
Now Sweden has disappeared from the estimate entirely, and Denmark is down to one percent.
Nothing real was taken from me. No ancestor vanished. No family story was disproved. But I was surprised to feel a little loss anyway. I had made room for that result in my imagination, and now science had quietly repossessed most of it.
The reverse happened with western Czechia, which appeared for the first time at two percent. My close friend Frank Albert is proud of his Czech roots, and I smiled when I saw it there in mine. There is no reason to assume we share an ancestor, but the possibility was enough to make the number feel personal.
Ireland has an even older hold on me. It was the first country I remember saying I wanted to visit someday. At one point, Scotland and Ireland together represented 15 percent of my ancestry estimate. That felt right, though I could not have explained why. Now that connection has dropped to about five percent.
The feeling remains stronger than the number.
That may be what interests me most about this whole exercise. We go looking for information, but we quickly start making meaning. We see percentages and convert them into belonging. We see a country name and feel pride, curiosity, kinship, even loss. We let a changing scientific estimate brush up against identity, memory, adoption, family, friendship, and place.
As DNA science evolves, it asks something of us as well. The science can tell us where pieces of our DNA most closely match current reference panels. It cannot tell us how much emotional weight to give those matches.
My ancestors did not change this week. Neither did the family that raised me, the friendships that matter to me, or the places that have spoken to me for reasons no DNA test could explain.
But the map changed again.
And somewhere on it, in a place called Cameroon, there is at least one person whose DNA helped illuminate a small part of mine.
That is enough to keep me curious. And already eager for next year’s update.
