Not long ago, I succeeded in convincing my better half to submit a DNA sample to ancestry.com for testing. We were pretty certain that the results would confirm what we knew about the Knapp-Mileski heritage. My father-in-law has always said he was 100% German. And we knew that the Mileski/Milewski side had emigrated from Poland to the U.S.

Well, the results are in… and we were surprised to learn that our Knapp/Mileski ancestry is a little more varied than we thought.

Here’s the breakdown according to ancestry.com:

Just as we expected, Mark is of 99% European heritage, with 50% coming from Eastern Europe and 40% coming from Western Europe.

Here’s what that means according to Ancestry about the Mileski/Milewski side:

Mark’s 40% Western European heritage came from the Knapp side, and includes these countries:

The real surprise came in looking at the trace regions.

Like a lot of people with roots in Europe (myself included), we learned that there is some Scandinavian influence. Those Vikings really got around in the old days!

Long an admirer of all things British (Dr. Who, James Bond, Monty Python and George Harrison) he was DELIGHTED to learn he has some British heritage in there somewhere – a whopping 3%!

The most intriguing part for me was finding out there was 1% from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain or Portugal). This confirmed what a gentleman from Germany, our cousin, Christoph Trares, told me about the origins of the Trares family in Germany.

You can read Christoph’s comments and my posting  about a Trares Spanish connection by clicking the link. Scroll down the page to read Christoph’s comments.

In any case, it is always wonderful when DNA results confirm an oral tradition handed down in the family. And thanks again to our German cousin Christoph for sharing that nugget of information with us.

Cousin Christoph, please feel free to get in touch with us and share anything else you may know about our mysterious Spanish ancestor!