DNA Family Secrets: What is my ethnicity?

Podcast: Janine's story https://youtu.be/-977JLCyahw
Where do you think come from?

I said Tunisia before.

Tunisia? Lee, where do you think I might be from?

No idea.

Morocco, look you've got this kind of Pocahontas style look and dark olive skin.

Spanish.

Spanish, maybe, who knows.

Janine has lived her entire life never knowing the identity or heritage of her birth father. Her white
British mum always kept her true parentage a secret.

Talk me through why you're taking a DNA test?

So, when I was born it was really obvious, I was not my dad's daughter, but everybody was trying to say I was. And the reason it was obvious was because I came out looking like Mowgli. I had this head of hair, super dark, and it just was, my dad Bill has blonde hair blue eyes.

And your mother's white?

My mum's white. So, my grandmother was really embarrassed about the fact that my mum had, A) had a child when she was 17, and B) it's me, who is not white. And what I find more bizarre than anything is, she tried to palm me off as being a white man's child. Myself and my mum moved in with Bill when I was three days old. And Bill said, ‘look at her skin, look at me, you can't say this is my daughter because it's not’.

And you've got a good relationship with Bill?

Amazing relationship, he's been in my life 43 years and just been the best dad in the world, you know.

Janine, what's the goal? What are you hoping to find out?

I think in an ideal world it would be to find out where I came from. What is within my DNA that makes me, me.

Yeah.

Even if somebody was to say, ‘Janine, this is this is what we've got about you, this is what we know about you’. Then I’d be like, yeah okay.

Today, Janine will receive her DNA test results. She hopes Turi can finally solve the mystery of her ancestry.

Hey, how are you?

I'm good, how are you?

You look lovely.

Thank you, so do you.

How do you feel?

A bit nervous, anxious, strange, strange mix of emotions really.

Well, it's unknown territory, isn’t it?

Yeah, 43 years of waiting for some information.

o next door, just have a chat with Turi and then come back in.

Hello, come sit down. So, actually yours has been a really complicated case and we've actually used some new research techniques, which we haven't done before, in the hopes of providing you with some answers.

I know that you're particularly interested in finding out about your biological father, and so what we're doing is obviously we're taking your DNA and we are matching it against populations from around the world and actually we've got a really clear result. So, we know you are getting strong matches around Pakistan, Northern India and into Afghanistan.

So, let's have a look at a map.

Okay, so you're getting a lot of matches in the Punjab province of Pakistan, which is part of that larger Punjab region of Northern India and Pakistan.

We think that your dad is Sikh, and we actually think that he's Jat Sikh.

What's that?

Okay, so, the Sikh religion is actually quite a young religion, but the Jat people, they're an ethnic group, which goes back much further, in that area. They are major landowners and farmers, and they have strong links to business, in that area. We think that your father probably arrived in Leicester, probably after World War II. So, this is the time when India and Pakistan were separated. And Leicester it's got the highest concentration of Sikhs in the East Midlands, it makes up about 5% of the population.

So, the matches that we are getting back from your DNA are not close matches. So, they are people who you would share a great, great, great grandparent or further, but the surnames that we're getting back are really giving us a hint as to what his ethnicity seems to be. And the surnames that are coming back are things like: Sidhu, Sahodar, Dat, Panu, all of these are Jat Sihk surnames.

But nothing turned up in the databases that could tell us who your father was we could only determine his ethnicity. But that's essentially as far as the DNA has got us.

Wow.

So, how's that?

It has definitely filled a void for me that has been missing, which was where am I from.

Yes, and that's really clear.

Representation: https://www.josarsby.com/turi-king

Видео DNA Family Secrets: What is my ethnicity? канала Professor Turi King