As an Englishman with an Irish surname, my Gaelic roots and DNA makeup have always interested me.
By the time that I was born, all of my Irish ancestors had passed away, including those who were born in England to Irish parents. So I’ve never really had the opportunity to hear first hand about my heritage.
From conversations with my dad over the years, I knew that my family primarily came from a town called Charlestown in County Mayo but details of specific names remained scarce, as his own father tragically died at the age of 42, when my dad was just 12.
Starting my family tree
Over the years I’ve dabbled with creating family trees on Ancestry and the Molloy side would always be where I’d start, but I never really had much success beyond finding out who my great great grandparents in that line were.
At the start of this year, I decided to give it another go and started a combined family tree for me and the relatively new Mrs Molloy. If nothing else, I thought it would be something interesting to show our kids when we eventually have them.
I very quickly got sucked in and started fleshing out other branches of my tree, rather than just focusing on the Molloy line. After finding potential relatives in places like New York, Wisconsin and California for the first time, it made it a bit more exciting and made me determined to keep going – even if I did hit some familiar brick walls on the Molloy side.
DNA decision
With some money I had left over from Christmas, I decided to buy a DNA test. I did so more out of hope than expectation and, perhaps naively, I wasn’t really expecting many matches at all.
After doing the test (and discovering that filling a tube full of spit is surprisingly difficult) I sent it off and then spent the next 7 ½ weeks waiting for the results to come, along with worrying whether I’d done the test properly and wondering whether I’d have to rip my family tree up if the test threw up any unexpected results.
Earlier this week, I finally got my results and it has been totally overwhelming. At the time of writing, I have 30,887 (!) matches – 16,393 on my dad’s side, 12,718 on my mum’s side and 1,776 yet to be assigned.
My two ‘close’ matches were people I already knew about – both first cousins once removed on my mum’s side. However, there are a further 16 in my ‘extended’ family that I had no idea about, along with tens of thousands of distant relatives from all around the world.
From being amazed that I had relatives in a couple of states, I’ve now discovered that I have family members in at least 30 of them, along with Canada, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand and Spain.
I’ve also discovered that I’m estimated to be ⅓ Irish. The rest of my ‘ancestral regions’ are unsurprisingly England (51%), as well as Scotland (10%), Wales (4%) and Germanic Europe (2%).
Challenges and quirks
I’ve now started the very long process of mapping my matches onto my tree as best as I can and although tools such as the Leeds Method have helped, it hasn’t been without challenges; while the vast majority of users have their name attached to the test, others have cryptic usernames. For example, one of my closer matches is simply known as ‘stringbass2’ and it’s not clear from their tree where our link is – despite working out that they’re on my maternal grandmother’s side, with the Leeds Method. However, while I’m able to message them on Ancestry to ask, they haven’t been online in around a year, which still makes it something of a brick wall.
Another quirk is seeing how the same surname has changed its spelling over the years, as I have relatively close matches from the Molloy line who spell it ‘Mulloy’.
Next steps
I’ve since uploaded my raw DNA data into MyHeritage and this has thrown up all sorts of new matches, from even more countries.
The whole process has made me realise that my family tree is something that I’m probably going to be working on in one form or another for the rest of my life. My next steps are definitely sitting down with family members to try and get some old photographs to give it a bit more colour, as well as any stories that can fill in gaps.
Mrs Molloy has also done a DNA test, which we should have the results of in a couple of weeks, and hers should be really interesting as her paternal grandmother came to England from Germany when she was very young and we have absolutely no idea who her great grandfather on that side is, or even if he’s German.
If this blog post gets a good response, I may do a separate one sharing her results, so let me know in the comments if you’d be interested to read that.
Have you ever done a DNA test or tried to map out your family tree? If so, how far did you get? Let me know down below.