Just Guyton

Have you ever taken one of those ancestry DNA tests?

I did.

Back in 2022, my mother gave me an AncestryDNA test as a gift because I wanted to know exactly what I was.

That sounds simple enough.

Send off your DNA, wait six to eight weeks, and eventually you get an email telling you that you’re a little bit of this, a whole lot of that, and maybe something you weren’t expecting.

At least, that’s what I thought I was signing up for.

I had no idea what I was actually in for.

When I was 12 years old, I had to do a project for school about my family history.

My father’s mother was the most wonderful German woman, and I knew her family had come from Germany. Naturally, I went straight to her.

I wasn’t investigating some great family mystery. I wasn’t searching for my roots.

I had a school project to finish, and I was trying to get an A.

I figured Grandma had the German family history, I needed the German family history, and this was going to be easy.

Instead, that’s when she told me the truth.

She had adopted my father.

My father already knew. In fact, he knew who his biological mother was. This wasn’t some hidden family secret that everyone had been keeping from him.

It was simply something I hadn’t known.

And it meant that although my grandmother’s German heritage was part of the family and culture my father was raised in, it wasn’t part of my biological ancestry.

Years later, when I finally took that DNA test, I wasn’t looking for my father’s biological family. I wasn’t trying to replace anyone, either.

There was nobody to replace.

My father was raised by an amazing woman, and I was incredibly blessed to have her as my grandmother.

I just wanted to know what I was.

I knew quite a bit about my maternal side of the family, so I had a pretty good idea of what would show up there.

My father’s side was another story.

I knew the last name of one of his biological relatives, and somewhere along the way I had managed to convince myself that this meant I was Russian.

Don’t ask me to defend my research methods.

There weren’t any.

I had a surname and apparently an imagination.

So when I sent my DNA away in 2022, the paternal side was what made me nervous.

Would the results confirm what I thought?

Would they tell me I was something completely different?

I genuinely didn’t know.

And waiting for those results was much more nerve-racking than I expected.

Eventually, they arrived.

Scotland and Ireland pretty much ran away with my DNA. England came in second, followed by smaller amounts of France and North Africa.

Well.

So much for my Russian theory.

But the ethnicity estimate turned out to be only the beginning.

Today, my Ancestry account shows 123,570 DNA matches.

Yes.

123,570.

And that number can keep growing as more people take DNA tests and new matches appear.

I went into this wanting to know my heritage.

Instead, I discovered that my father has 13 biological siblings.

And, to be completely honest, there could be more.

We did reach out to some people. Most didn’t want to talk.

And I understand that.

DNA testing can uncover information people weren’t expecting. Sometimes a message from a stranger doesn’t just say, “Hey, we’re related.”

It can complicate someone’s understanding of their own family.

We weren’t looking to disrupt anybody’s life. We weren’t asking anyone for anything. We were simply hoping for a conversation.

Most people weren’t interested, and we respected that.

But one person was willing to talk.

And I will always be grateful that she was.

My father had known the identity of his biological mother, but the identity of his biological father was another matter.

He had been told several different stories over the years.

With some digging, DNA connections, and the help of the one person who was willing to speak with us, we eventually figured it out.

My father finally knew who his biological father was.

Unfortunately, there would never be an opportunity for a conversation between them. His biological father had died in 1976.

But an unanswered question finally had an answer.

And for me, that answer came with one particularly interesting detail.

My biological paternal grandfather had been born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina before eventually making his way to Ohio.

I have always been drawn to the mountains of North Carolina.

I didn’t know his story when that love developed. I didn’t know that was where he had come from.

Does DNA explain why I’ve always felt that pull toward those mountains?

I couldn’t possibly tell you that.

But finding out certainly made me stop and think.

Maybe some things just hit differently once you know where you came from.

It’s now 2026, and I’ve found myself thinking about that DNA test again.

Not because I’m searching for more relatives.

This time, I’m interested in something completely different.

Stories.

If my DNA points heavily toward Scotland, Ireland and England, with connections to France and North Africa, what stories came from those places?

What did people fear?

What did they believe lived beyond the firelight?

What creatures wandered their mountains, waters and forests?

What warnings did one generation pass to the next?

And perhaps most importantly for someone like me:

How much of what we think we know about their folklore is actually true?

Because you know how I am about a rabbit hole.

I’m not satisfied with finding the spooky version somebody posted on the internet and repeating it as fact.

If we’re going to talk about banshees, fairy forts, púca, kelpies, selkies, ghouls, jinn traditions and the stranger stories connected to the regions represented in my DNA, we’re going to find out where those stories actually came from.

We’ll separate documented history from folklore.

We’ll distinguish religious teachings from regional folk traditions.

And if the internet has taken a relatively modern story, slapped the word “ancient” on it and repeated it until everybody believes it?

We’re going to talk about that too.

So a DNA test I took four years ago because I simply wanted to know what I was has managed to send me down another rabbit hole.

Only this time, I’m inviting you along.

We’ve got several countries, centuries of stories, more than 123,000 DNA matches, and one formerly self-proclaimed Russian who turned out not to be Russian at all.

This should be fun.

—Guyton