Wild Wednesday- Murky Soup- Part II

My red headed granddaughter

The wonderful parents

ah...now it makes sense!

Ah, yes, DNA is a murky soup, when you begin to stir it around you never know what you will find inside. I remember when my granddaughter was born and she came out with bright red hair, everyone was surprised- after all, both her parents did not look like they would be able to produce such a child. When people meet me, then they say, "OKAY...now we understand why she looks the way she does!" 

my mother in law with my neice

my husband with our darling Kailynn

As for my husband, he tends to take after his mom. So no wonder we did not want to believe the original Y-DNA test results.  We could not argue when the second set of tests came back for his dad. The Y-DNA test reconfirmed what my husband's test had already said. Two different companies had done the same test using my husband's DNA and my father-in-law's DNA and the Y-DNA showed there was definitely a Caucasian link. Now we waited for my father-in-law's mitochondrial DNA test results.

Sigh...we waited...and waited...and then the results arrived. We opened it up and it was confirmed once and for all that my father-in-law was not Chinese. His mitochondrial DNA showed a link to several different groups- but Chinese were not amongst those groups. A pointer to North Indian descent seemed to be evident and that plus the stories which had circulated around my father-in-law when he grew up, made us think this could be a possible option. 

Now we held answers in our hands....and yet...these answers only opened up so many new questions. How in the world did my father-in-law come into the home of his 'adoptive' parents. Why did they not tell him his  real origin? Why had they kept it a secret? The answers did bring some clarity to why certain things happened- like when my father-in-law's father passed away he was not left any inheritance. It always seemed a bit strange but he had thought, "Oh it was because maybe he was not my real father"- but then when his mother passed away and was also left 'out' of the will, this made him curious. Now, with the DNA results in hand, it made a bit more sense. 


The DNA results from the paternal line were uploaded on an internet data base this allowed for possible connections. The closest 'cousins' were named "King" and "Galbraith"- the connection was so close that there had to be some link. More questions arose and more research needed to be done. When we discussed the results with my father in law, we did not tell him about the possible surnames we discovered. 

He was shocked to hear that he was not Chinese.  After the shock wore off, he said, "You know what....when I was a young boy people in my town would say that I belonged to a particular house and I should go there since that is where I was from"- we asked him if he knew who was living in that house. He said, "Of course, a British man." 


"What was their name?"


"Their surname was King"



We had found a possible answer to at least one of our questions. In the years since our discovery, we have done more research.  We were never able to find any definite links to the mitochondrial DNA. We have discovered few more answers, but it seems this murky soup of DNA produces far more questions than answers. It has been an interesting concoction.

*Original tests were done by ancestry.com
 Subsequent tests were done by familytreedna.com