Who am I?

Although the data is a bit old now, my sister did the ancestry.com genetic profile, which should be identical to my own. (I'm not interested in paying for it, because I already know what to expect, even before looking at my sister's data. And she only did it because there was a flash sale where it was crazy cheap.)

While this isn't Stone Age or even Bronze Age genetics, it goes back pretty far in terms of delineating who I am.

The biggest chunk came up as 56% "English and Northwestern European." This is primarily Anglo-Saxon, and I know that we're mostly Anglo-Saxon already. It may not be entirely Anglo-Saxon, however; the oldest person with our last name that we can draw an unbroken line to was a Norman who crossed the channel with William the Conqueror. The Normans were, as well documented, originally a bunch of Vikings who had raided the Frankish coast of what became Normandy, going so far as to sack Paris even. When Charles the Simple made the deal that created the Duchy of Normandy, the Vikings settled there and probably significantly mingled with local Frankish and even Gaulish peoples who were already there. In any case, the Anglo-Saxon genetics from the original Anglo-Saxon settlement of England is almost indistinguishable from Scandinavians at the same time. The "English and Northwestern European" should mostly represent Anglo-Saxon, but some of the Frankish and Norman admixture could be rolled up in there too.

As an aside, it also shows 3% Scandinavian, specifically 2% Sweden and Denmark, and 1% Finland. I don't really trust this tail data, especially because of the low resolution available at the time this test was run, and I have never found any Scandinavian ancestry in my family tree. However, like I said, the original Anglo-Saxon DNA was identical to Scandinavian DNA of the late Roman period, and the Normans were an admixed Viking/Frankish/Gaulish people. If there is any reality to that tail percentage, then that's probably where it comes from; the ethnogenesis of the English does include some detectable Scandinavian influence, even with genetic drift separating the Anglo-Saxons from the Saxons and other North Sea coastal Germanic people. 

The remainder of my genetics comes from basically two sources; 28% Scottish comes from a number of ancestors that I know of who were Celtic, including from the Galloway, Stuart, and Campbell clans at least, as well as others.

The remaining 13% is from Spain/Portugal, and we know a fair bit about it. My great-grandfather was 100% ethnic Portuguese; although born in the US, his immediate forebears came from Madeira, where they had lived for centuries. Madeira was mostly settled from the northwestern part of the Iberian peninsula, which had been the Celtic nation of Gaelicia before being conquered by, in succession, the Romans, the Suebians, the Moors (although they didn't penetrate much that far north) and the Visigoths. Exactly who these northwestern Portuguese people really are, in relation to these more ancient population, is unclear. Although he died long before I was born, I've seen pictures of him from early in his marriage. He looked pretty Portuguese, with thick, dark hair, brown eyes and bronzed skin. Curiously, however, for a while we didn't know he was Portuguese. For whatever reason, when he moved from the town he grew up in, he told everyone that his name was French, which I guess sounded less foreign, and allowed him to fit in better to the American tapestry at the time (I mean, today, being foreign, fake American or even hostile to Americans is very fashionable in America. That wasn't true when he was young a hundred years ago.) In any case, the Portuguese phenotype was still pretty strong in my dad's generation; both he and his younger sister (and to a lesser extent his older brother and older sister) still have a Portuguese "look" to them. However, pretty much nobody of my generation has that; we're all 1/8 Portuguese and in all of the cousin-families, we're all 7/8 more typical American genetics; Anglo-Saxon mostly, but with a bit of Scandinavian and other DNA mixed in. My mom is almost entirely regular-old Anglo-Saxon for example, having had a family that came to the Massachusetts Bay colony and moved west to rural Utah with the Mormon pioneers. My dad is 1/4 Portuguese, and is the source of my 1/8 (13%) Portuguese ancestry, as well as all of the Scottish ancestry. Between those two, is 41% of my ancestry, and it all comes from my dad. The rest of my dad is probably Anglo-American, as well as the Norman name, so maybe the Scandinavian comes from him as well. I get surprisingly little genetic diversity from my mom. 

Up through the 1990s, that's about the idea of what an American was. There really wasn't all that much diversity in America until the vast Replacement Migration started. We were all pretty much Anglo-Saxons with a fair bit of northern European admixture sprinkled in (more German than my own ancestry; I have essentially none, having Scandinavian instead). And there's there's a bit of other admixture too, which my Portuguese ancestry represents; American always welcomed some diversity as long as that diversity didn't threaten to overwhelm the majority. Now, it's constantly rubbed in our face that there are projections of minority-majority status for Americans in America in a generation or two. That, however, is based on trends not changing, which seems unlikely to me.

Anyway, I didn't mean to take a socio-political turn, but its inevitable when talking about heritage, since mine is pretty iconically American, including a niche strain of something slightly more exotic than British genetics.