A DNA Story

My German wife has a curve or two in the family history.....where one side of her family walked over from Spain about six hundred years ago (from up on the northern coastline), and arrived into a rural village outside of Wiesbaden.  The original guy (an Spaniard) apparently captivated the locals in some way, and he ended with a loosely translated name that means.....well....'bull-fighter' in German.  Why he left, is a total mystery.  I doubt if there was much conversation on his Spanish name, and they just gave him a fresh new German name. 

So, for years....her claim is that she's about 90-percent German, and 10-percent Spanish.  You can figure that about eight to twelve generations have come and gone since the 'Spaniard'.
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I challenged her to do a DNA test last year and she accepted the challenge. Her expectation?  Some Spanish DNA and mostly all German.

Well....the results came back last week.  It's a bit of a shocker.

She's basically 46-percent German.  That's it.

The Spanish DNA?  It barely shows up at 1-percent.

So there's two puzzles in the remaining DNA.  There's 26-percent British DNA, and no relative from ancestor noted ever from the isle.  So how it got there?

Well....this is Wiesbaden and it was the hub for wellness and gambling back in the 1840 to 1914 era.  The wealthy from across Europe, Russia, and the US came for the spa effect.  I would take a guess that the great-grandmother was a product from summer passionate moment with a Brit guest in town. And from that.....produced a 50-percent Brit into the family line.

The other issue?  There's around 23-percent which more or less comes from the Scandinavian and northwestern Europe.....Viking territory.  This Spaniard who moved to the village?  If you go back to the 1000 to 1300 era....there were continual Viking raids along the French and Spanish coasts.  Villages were pillaged and women raped. I would take a guess that some Spaniard gal produced Viking-related kids, and maybe within the next generation....it occurred again.

Course, there is this other little issue....a half-percent of Italian DNA laying there, which the DNA folks suggested crossed over into the family tree in the 1750 to 1830 period. 

The curious thing is that a lot of Germans think they are almost pure German, and something like this comes up....making them wonder about their past.