Ancestry helps ask: So, who are you anyway?

It is not about cheering for a new team at the World Cup, even though screaming ‘Camerooooooon’ is awfully fun.

Just when I was getting used to being 36 percent from Cameroon/Congo; 17 percent from Ivory Coast/Ghana; 12 from percent Mali; 8 percent from Benin/Togo; 7 percent Africa Southeastern Bantu; 6 percent Nigeria; 5 percent Senegal and 5 percent Iberian Peninsula sprinkled with Ireland/Scotland/Wales; European Jewish; Africa South-Central Hunter-Gatherers and Asia East, Ancestry sent me an update.

Now I am a whopping 43 percent from Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu Peoples; 32 percent from Ivory Coast/ Ghana; 8 percent from Mali; 4 percent from Ireland and Scotland; 4 percent from Nigeria; 2 percent from Africa SouthCentral Hunter-Gatherers and 1 percent each from Sweden and Norway.

I literally spit in a tube, packed said tube in a preaddressed box and sent it off to Ancestry after getting the kit as a freebie at a journalism conference I attended in August.

I’d like to say the results I received a few weeks later were hogwash — especially with the update. Can’t say that.

The results, particularly the just updated ones, seem reasonable, and several people I know I am related to have shown up as DNA matches.

They even identified a co-worker I’ve known for years is a distant cousin.

Ancestry chalked the change in my ethnicity estimate to the fact that in the week or two since I got those first results, it began using more samples from more regions from which to draw its conclusion.

When the company launched in 2012, it says it compared customer DNA against 22 possible regions. Now it says it has more than 380 regions.

“For example, instead of one Iberian Peninsula region, we now have separate regions for Spain, Portugal, and Basque. And our Asia East region has been replaced by China, Korea and Northern Asia, Japan, Southeast Asia—Dai (Tai), Southeast Asia—Vietnam, and Philippines,” the company says in its Q and A

session.

(Seems like a legitimate answer to me, but maybe my opinion will change if I collect “more samples from more regions.”)

I’ve spent a lot of time Googling people from this particular country or that one since getting the results.

I am looking for my own face: dimples, cheek bones, eyebrows…

Before now, the furthest I could track my family back was the South: Tennessee and Alabama.

Like many, my family’s history is one lost and confused due to slavery, displacement and the impact of the same.

My grandparents only said so much, and as far as I can tell, little was written down about the origin of us.

I, of course, knew that was not where the story began, but West Africa (where most American slaves originated) is a big piece of Earth’s second largest continent.

I am American and proud of it, but being American is only part of the story of who I am. That is why I, like millions of other Americans, willingly spit in a tube and shipped it off to a lab somewhere.

It is not about cheering for a new team at the World Cup, even though screaming “Camerooooooon” is awfully fun. We aren’t the past, but the past can inform the future.