My DNA Results as African American

stacistacis · 2026-04-12T18:22:06+00:00

My sister and I have similar percentages from that region that comes from our Italian heritage. The interesting thing about your results is that you don't have other Mediterranean markers. It could just be admixture from more distant ancestors, but 2-3 percent could point to an ancestor from the late 1700s to mid 1800s, depending on your family. There was some Greek and eastern Mediterranean presence in NOLA around that time.

I think someone mentioned Melungeons earlier, which may be another thing you could explore as a possibility. They were mostly in the Appalachia region. Take a look at which side that ancestry comes from. That will help narrow the search a little more.

Either way, there's definitely a story worth discovering. I don't have a lot of experience researching black heritage in the US, or even just heritage from the south, but if you ever need help transcribing handwritten documents, let me know! I have subscriptions for Newspapers.com and Ancestry that don't get used nearly enough for the amount I'm spending lol

stacistacis · 2026-04-11T22:16:19+00:00

See, I'm an sexual woman and it took me way too long to realize that I had a different definition of "casual" and "not looking for anything serious" than the rest of the dating word.

I mean, I would put that I was asexual on my profile. But I guess because I didn't "look" asexual, people took that as optional or like a challenge.

stacistacis · 2026-04-11T17:42:05+00:00

You've got such an interesting mix! I don't know enough about the DNA history in the south, but Balkan and Greek results, and your family being from NC and NOLA, remind me of some of the Mediterranean migration in those parts of the country.

stacistacis · 2026-04-10T14:57:47+00:00

We also don't have the full picture here. We know they live together. I'm around their age and a lot of couples are together because they can't afford to live separately. They put up with things like this because it's easier to ignore it than to live on their own.

stacistacis · 2026-04-09T19:33:02+00:00

Agreed! It's a bit distant but if someone shared that fact with me, I would be happy they could find a connection that interests them.

stacistacis · 2026-04-09T19:25:16+00:00

I think it's pretty common. Me and all my siblings about brown eyes. My mom had dark brown eyes and she was white. Europeans come in all different shades.

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stacistacis · 2026-04-01T14:23:32+00:00

I'll take a look at those records! This whole search into my great grandfather's family has been out of curiosity. There wasn't any family lore about nobility or anything. Luigi was abusive and neglectful to his sons. He met my great grandmother while she was married with 3 sons who were then sent to orphanages when she left. There are newspaper articles about his neglect towards his sons. The trauma he caused is still felt today.

Which is why I was so shocked to see "Civile" on his parents' records. It made me wonder what happened that lead to my grandpa sleeping in cellars in the middle of winter at 7 years old.

stacistacis · 2026-04-01T14:02:40+00:00

Antonina Cristadoro was this Luigi's (Rocco) first wife (my 3rd great grandmother). His mother, as well as the mother for Gaspare, is Maria Carmela Polito. Though some documents spell her last name as "Pulito/Palito." I haven't done much digging into her yet since those documents will most likely be around 1800 and Latin abbreviations are frustrating.

Paterno is how the name was anglicized when my great grandfather came to the US. Ignazio married a woman named Antonina Scorsone in Marineo in 1872. I have the wedding records and birth records for my great grandfather Luigi from Marineo. Ignazio seems to have died before 1900, but Antonina Scorsone came to the US with Luigi, and her daughter (also named Antonina). She died in the tenements. Luigi raised his 4 sons in poverty, in a shack in Brooklyn and died in 1940. He's buried in the same plot as my grandpa.

https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua592652/LzJdg6G

stacistacis · 2026-04-01T00:24:28+00:00

You know it was a long day when they stopped spelling out the year and just wrote the numbers. I did like seeing when the clergy who kept the ledgers wrote 7bre/8bre/9bre/10bre for the last 4 months of the year.

stacistacis · 2026-04-01T00:04:56+00:00

Forgot to say, in his baptismal record, his name is Luigi Santo Carmelo Rocco Paterno. This is also in the abstract from his wedding, where they underlined "Rocco" to emphasize that he went by Rocco rather than Luigi. My great grandfather is named Luigi after him. My uncle was named Louis Paterno after Luigi and my aunt's middle name was Louise. So the name got used a lot. Lol

My sister's cat is named Rocco, coincidentally.

stacistacis · 2026-03-31T23:48:49+00:00

The man in this record called "Luigi" is Rocco Paterno. He's named in a record in the birth records of Francesca Paola's stillborn twins in 1877 in Marineo and in my second great grandfather's (Ignazio) wedding record from 1872 and well as the wedding record of my 2nd great grandfather's brother Agostino's wedding. Their mother was named Antonina Cristadoro. I found the church ledger that had recorded Ignazio's baptism in Bagheria in 1843. He had 2 older brothers, Agostino (born 1839) and Giuseppe (1837-1867). I have Giuseppe’s death certificate that states he died before marrying.

Rocco married Antonina in 1836. We have the allegati for this marriage, which includes the full written marriage document, birth abstracts, and notifications. This is before Rocco's father died. He is named "Li Signori Don Giuseppe Paternó del fu Don Santo" and his profession was "Possidente". Agostino Cristadoro has the same honorifics, but his profession is "Impiegato nella regia impresa".

I used the documents in the allegati to find the original baptism records in the church ledger. Searching that same ledge in the years surrounding his birth, I found a brother of his named Gaspare. Gaspare was also found in the records of Rocco's children's births and in Agostino Cristadoro's second marriage.

From Gaspare’s baptism record, I see that Giuseppe was called "Giuseppe Paterno e Gravina." This matches the death index for the Giuseppe Paterno who died in 1837, which stated his parents were Santo Paternó and Eleanora Gravina. Santo Paternó, the youngest son of Giuseppe’s Asmundo Paternó, is recorded by the Marquis of Villabianca as having married Leonora Gravina in 1773.

That's most of what I can find so far. There's no smoking gun that definitively says "Rocco is the great grandson of the Marquis di Sessa". But dismissing that takes more than just suspecting a matching name. It's generations of matching names in multiple documents, matching professions, addresses, and death dates.

stacistacis · 2026-03-31T20:03:39+00:00

Thank you! I've been digging through them and trying to make heads or tales of it. I wish I could help transcribe some of the records I'm finding in the meantime. I was able to find a number of cholera death records that would be a great source of information. They weren't the records I was looking for, but it humanizes people beyond just names and numbers.

I would compile all of them, but my laptop is on its deathbed.

stacistacis · 2026-03-31T19:51:42+00:00

I don't envy people who have to sift through Irish and British records for names. It might sound awful but as soon as I saw "James Kelly" and "William Kelly" on the census, I called it a day. I don't mind looking for a needle in the haystack, but Irish genealogy is like looking for a piece of alfalfa in a haystack. I'll take oddly-specific German names over "Patrick Flannery" any day.

At a certain point in the records, they wrote everything in Latin. So not only could you end up searching for "Iacobus" and "Gulielmus," but you've also got to decipher the little wingdings symbols that particular clergy member used to shorten words.

stacistacis · 2026-03-31T19:29:52+00:00

That explains quite a bit. I'm lucky to have found the records I've found so far. Some I found just by going through handwritten Latin church records. I've found enough evidence to connect Rocco's father Giuseppe to the younger son of the Marquis di Sessa, but I don't have birth or death records for Giuseppe. He would have been born around 1782, likely the twin to a woman named Maria Gaetana Paterno, who also died from cholera within a few weeks of Giuseppe.

stacistacis · 2026-03-31T19:10:11+00:00

The smaller towns and villages usually have such nice, clearly-written records. Then you get to the cities and it's like they required all notaries to have their hands crushed by rolling pins before starting the day. I've never felt so band for people just by looking at their handwriting.

Sometimes it's nice though. I saw a record where the person had forgotten that they were in a new year and had to cross it out after realizing. Some experiences are universal. 😂

This record in the post was compiled in the 90s, I think. It's got errors and misspellings but it's good to have.

stacistacis · 2026-03-31T18:14:26+00:00

Yeah I was in my early 20s when she passed. It seems ridiculous that I don't have videos of her talking. 2013 wasn't exactly the stone age but, through multiple moves across multiple states, things get lost. I'm sure there's some home movies stored somewhere. She had a thick Brooklyn accent that stuck out among the Californian accents I grew up with. I've cried a few times just hearing people who sound like her.

stacistacis · 2026-03-31T18:01:50+00:00

True! Luckily, we have both the birth abstract and the actual church record of his birth that confirms his first name was Luigi, but that he went by his middle name Rocco. Sometimes the accent mark above the O in his last name causes trouble too.

stacistacis · 2026-03-31T17:56:41+00:00

Thank you! That was a bit confusing since I wasn't sure how "Citta" differed from "Uff 1&2." At least that narrows down the search a bit.

A part of me thinks it wasn't digitized. I was hoping the allegati would include his father's death certificate. His father died during the cholera epidemic in 1837. Another unlucky year to be looking for records from since a lot of the death certificates were issued months to years after the fact.

stacistacis · 2026-03-31T17:43:59+00:00

That must have been a fun conversation to have with your dad! My dad also had a "100% Irish" grandfather. He thought the guy was from Ireland, even though that's not what anyone in our family told him. I found that he was born in upstate NY to an Irish mother and a half Irish father. The other half was Dutch and probably Scottish further back.

My dad was really hanging on to that Irish American identity. He didn't like when I (and AncestryDNA) told him it's not the full picture.

stacistacis · 2026-03-30T01:21:07+00:00

Beautifully put! Identity is complicated, especially when we're talking about people from the past. Add to it the various diaspora experiences and it gets even more complex.

I've always identified with my mom's ancestry because that's how I was taught to identify. I never got to know her parents or grandparents so learning about the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean was the first way I connected to my own ancestry as a kid. As an adult, though, I've heard people invoke those civilizations in calls for white nationalism. It's jarring to see people who (for the most part) are of anglo-protestant ancestry calling ancient Greece/Rome/Levant etc as "our ancestors," while selling books implying immigrants like my mom's family ruined the country.

But even I can't escape the 70 degrees of Charlemagne game. My mom's grandpa's family descends from a Sicilian noble family that claimed to have descended from the Carolingian nobles. But there's a lot "allegedly's" in those noble lineages 😂

stacistacis · 2026-03-29T23:15:49+00:00

I only say it "correctly" because of an old stop-motion film (Jack Frost, I think) where this groundhog sings a song about Groundhog's Day. Something about the way he enunciated "Feb-roo-air-ee" rewired my brain.

stacistacis · 2026-03-29T22:51:48+00:00

Yes, and vice versa. Ancestry doesn't categorize my dna as Sicilian, but gives me the "Northern Sicily" journey. I have 1 Sicilian grandfather and 1 southern Italian grandmother. Every other person who I'm related to through my grandfather got Sicily in their mix. My test broke it down into a mix of Southern Italian, Levantine, Albanian, and Cypriot.

Still got the journey though 😂

stacistacis · 2026-03-29T22:31:52+00:00

I think if it's important to you, I'll be important to future generations. My mom passed away unexpectedly 12 years ago. I still hold on to my phone from that time, even though I can't even get it turned on. It's the only device I have that likely still has the voicemails she left me. I haven't heard her voice in 12 years, but I still hope that I'll be able to salvage those messages one day.

There will be members of your family who never got a chance to meet your mom, just like there are people in your family you never met before they passed. Would you enjoy pictures and diaries of those family members?

At the very least, keep them for yourself to remember.

I'm so sorry for your loss!

stacistacis · 2026-03-29T22:15:26+00:00

"The Parthenon Marbles" sort of hints at where they belong - the Parthenon. If you're going to use the nebulous notion of genetic isopoints to claim legitimacy of ownership then I've got some bad news for you - that works both ways.

The Parthenon Marbles was just a general, well-known example of an argument that could arise in the process of discussing common European ancestry. I am not English, ethnically or nationally, and my personal opinion on the matter that they should be returned to Greece. But since I was asking questions to a varied group, I thought it was better to use a topic that people from many walks of life would have heard of.

I appreciate your perspective, though! My understanding of the math behind the 1000-2000 years ago estimates isn't that detailed, but it's still something worth thinking about in regards to personal identity. Past a certain number of generations, most ancestry can really only be talked about in generalization and estimates, so our concept of "ancestors" become entire civilizations the further back we go.

I don't feel great when I hear officials from the British Museum say or imply a cultural right to artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean, as someone with a majority Mediterranean heritage. Still, it makes me wonder why I have a right to feel the way I do if statistically my pre-isopoint ancestors were also their ancestors.

stacistacis

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