I resisted DNA testing for years. Not because I didn’t believe in it—I did. Not because I was worried about government surveillance—I’m a historian, half the things I research are probably on some kind of watchlist anyway. No, I avoided it for a much simpler reason: I was terrified of what I might find.
Genealogy is a delicate thing. You spend decades carefully reconstructing your family tree, cross-referencing documents, combing through archives, suffering through bad handwriting and impossible names, only to one day spit into a tube and potentially watch it all burn to the ground.
But curiosity won. It always does. So, one day, I ordered the kit.
A few weeks later, the results arrived in my inbox. I braced myself. And then, the first thing I saw was the worst possible scenario:
“0% Iberian Peninsula.”
Excuse me?
I blinked. I refreshed the page. I checked again. No Spain. No Portugal. Not even a hint of Iberia.
I had packed up my life, moved to Madrid, and spent months digging through Spanish archives, all based on a family story that now appeared to be a complete and utter lie.
Panic set in. I started questioning everything. Had I been chasing ghosts that weren’t even mine? Had I spent an unholy amount of time decoding 18th-century Spanish script for no reason? Was my entire existence now just an elaborate, sun-drenched mistake?
I paced the apartment. I stared at the ceiling. I briefly considered just moving into the archives permanently, since apparently, I had no real roots anywhere. Then, I took a deep breath and read the rest of the results.
It turned out, my DNA breakdown was a little more complicated than the big, dramatic existential crisis I had just experienced. There was plenty of Western European DNA, scattered throughout France, Italy, and some undefined “Southern European” category that was vague enough to cover half the continent. There were traces of North Africa—no surprise there, given Spain’s history—but the part that really caught my eye? Sephardic Jewish ancestry.
Now, that was interesting.
Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, scattering across the Mediterranean, North Africa, and beyond. Many changed names, many assimilated into new cultures, but plenty kept fragments of their identity alive through traditions, whispered family stories, and—apparently—DNA.
So, while I may not be directly tied to Madrid in the way I expected, my history still looped back to Spain in a different way.
And, let’s be honest, I wasn’t about to quit after one identity crisis. If anything, this just gave me a new rabbit hole to dive into.
Of course, there was also the other part of my DNA results. The part that suggested a very close relative was not, in fact, who I thought they were.
But that’s a story for another day. Preferably a day when I have more whiskey on hand.