A Surprising Result in my Ancestry
A few months ago, I got had a DNA test done through The Genographic Project, hoping that it would fill in a few blanks in my family tree.
Up to this point, I have made considerable progress on my ancestry on my father’s side, which is almost purely Belgian, comprising a mixture of Walloon and Flemish ancestry. On my mother’s side, things are a bit more complicated, with a several relatively recent immigrants, including my Jewish grandfather, who was born in Egypt but whose family was originally from Belarus, and a few German immigrants. The rest was a good old South African mix.
The biggest mystery though was the ancestry of my maternal great-great-grandmother, Johanna Jacoba Bender, born around 1868, and married to Abraham Michael Reid.
This all changed somewhat when I got the results from my DNA test back. There were no surprised on my Y-DNA result, which is common in Western Europe, but my mitochondrial DNA was a different story. It turns out that my mtDNA haplogroup is L0d2a1a. This haplogroup is only found in the Khoisan population group historically, nad in more recent history is common in the coloured community in the Cape, indicating a high percentage of mixed relationships had Khoisan women in the mix. This must have included Johanna Jacoba Bender.
I still can find no further information on her parentage, but my DNA result does confirm that she was coloured, or at least her mother was of mixed origins. I had no idea that I had coloured blood so close in my ancestry, as up to now all my known ancestors have been white, with the exception of a few distant ancestors from the 17th century.
Since this revelation, I have been able to find out more about her husband, Abraham Michael Reid, my great-great-grandfather. He too was of coloured origins. His death certificate in 1932 lists him as white, however, his family history says otherwise. He was born in 1864 to James William Henry Reid, who was either an Irish or Scottish immigrant, and Helena Louisa Francis, a coloured woman from Muizenburg.
Thanks to the test, I was able to uncover this surprise. Some of my family would not be too happy to know all of this, but I am thoroughly delighted.