During the worst of the illness the past few months, I've been getting into genealogy and decided to do a test with family tree dna, especially since we know very little about my dad's side.
This is what came up as my origins, a pretty even split between my dad and mom :
Then I got to see a list of users in their database that show up as relatives. The closest relative was a possible 2nd cousin. This woman is filipino hawaiian, and I happen to be related to other relatives of hers, which is notable because her nephew was unsure of certain connections within his family (he's an engineer that does genealogy as a hobby). His aunt is his mom's half-sister, but they were not raised together, and she was adopted. Since islanders don't seem to have kept very good records and they adopted randomly, and changed names whenever they wanted, it has been difficult to trace back any line further than my dad's grandmother, who was named Phoebe Api. However, I was able through Ancestry, to find an old census of when she was growing up, and her parents came to Hawaii from China, where their name was "Ah Ping":
I also don't know a lot (none of the family does) about my dad's birth. For some reason, his mom Mary Kalili, moved from Hawaii to the Philippines, and had my dad there in Cadiz in 1943, and I found this roster of the USS Brewster, leaving the Philippines heading for Honolulu on Aug 7th 1945, a day after we bombed Hiroshima. My dad's mom married very young and her name was Abarca, but she didn't go to the Philippines with her husband. Many tales were told about who my dad's dad is, but no one knows. He was 2 yrs old by the time they left. And his mom called him "Jerry Abarca" before she remarried another man in Hawaii named Gregorio Gallardo (not his dad). I guess I'll never know, but this roster was interesting, especially because someone wrote "caucasian filipino" by his name:
I was talking with the genealogy expert about my results and we used this oracle program on gedmatch that calculates based on your dna matches, what your most probably make up is, if you were only 2 things. Mine were "52% Malay-cambodian/47%scottish". He said that most Filipino, would show up as Malay/Cambodian.
On my mom's side, there was a lot of documentation for several generations(each of which had 10 kids!) And we traced back to a Welsh semi-famous historical figure, who came to Pennsylvania and was working with William Penn to help Welsh immigrants get their own land. His name was Dr. Griffith Owen. Pretty cool!
I started getting into John's side which was cool too, but there's too much to post, so I'll have to update later. We are waiting on both our 23andme dna testing :)
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