I'm Italian!!!

Cool! Another excuse to visit Italy. :)

Congratulazioni!

Looks like another mixed breed mutt. The best kind. Just settle for American.

I have always settled Frank. It changes nothing for me. I am always American first. In 200,000 years of history we are all mutts. As an adoptee, it is nice to FINALLY know what flows through my body. Looking like no one all my life, it is sure nice to know what I can pass down to my kids, my grandkids. I really can't pass down American.

Congratulations! To the Jersey Shore with you :-)

Way cool! No more guilt about eating lots of gelato. LOL

Marie De Medici(husband Gaston) was my 11th great grandmother. I don't look at all Italian. Northern European yes. But even if I hadn't found out, pretty certain a 3rd trip to Italy is a certainty. The Gastons left for Scotland and then America, defended Charleston from the British.
Ps, my hubby thought he knew what his ancestry was but there was a surprise. no adoptions just an oops.

Great to hear, Katie! Wonderful to know one's roots.

Italy calling you makes sense to me. I feel that way about Paestum. I could not figure our why I had this need to keep going back to it. One day I was in the Sala Romana at the Museum, and I saw my exact last name on a series of coins, with a narrative about the Roman magistrate who ran the city - in 194 BCE!

ttmom12, 11 times great grandmother!!! That's crazy!!! AND way COOL! And that's the thing, there are a lot of oops. People just don't know.

Zoe, It's nice to know this calling feeling isn't just in my head. What a find! It must've taken your breath away. I wish I knew names. I do know why but I feel called more to the North than the South.

AND I finally have a response to all those that say ITALY, but your Irish. Why Italy??? Now I can say because I'm 19% Italian & only 10% Irish!!! My adoptive parents are 1st generation Irish, on all sides. I've been to Ireland three times. My kids are named Declan, Liam, Niamh & Nora (which is Italian, but she's name after her great grandmother who was born in Claire).

Thank you for sharing in my enthusiasm. I love history, family history especially. We are a story of one, but really we are a story made up of many, many chapters. It's the chapters that is intriguing to me.

Katie,
You can take those results to gedmatchdotcom and upload them. Then it will break the results down even further. I used ancestrydotcom, downloaded to a zip file that must remain closed then upload to GedMatch and got greater details as well as matches.
We were in Venice end of April and though I loved it I loved Florence and the Val D'orcia more. That was the second trip.

The feeling you had about being pulled to Italy was (in my opinion) a type of connection to the past that really does exists. Years ago I always had a peculiar "pulling" feeling about a certain place. I later found out that my great, great, great grandparents owned a real southern planation there before the civil war -- or as they say in Charleston S.C., "The late unpleasantness".

ttmom12 OMG I can't wait to do that! Now I don't want to take the kids to the beach!!!

TC WOW! That is so neat!!! How re-affirming. Well it may be ugly, but it's part of history. That which we learn from in hopes of not making the same mistakes. Really, really cool. Thank you for sharing.

Brava, Italiana!

Hi Katie:

I agree with the pull. My family is German, English and French. Needless to say I love france, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Anywhere with Alps. I have been to France three times, Switzerland twice and Germany and Austria once. I have plans to go to Paris this Christmas and hopefully Switzerland next year.

I just feel at home in those countries. Also love the food!,

Katie, That's so much fun! And how wonderful it is to know your roots, so to speak. I love knowing my roots. My mother was adopted and we had contact with her bio father, little with bio Mom. However, running their family tree, along with ours and my mom's adopted family-which has always been first-is wonderful. I'm very Colonial New England, but with a Swedish grandmother. However, when DNA was run, I am more (twice as much) English than my British son in law, and he's more (twice as much) Swedish than I am. Go figure. I hope you obtained your DNA through a site like Ancestry.com as they will find relative matches, which I would think you'd find interesting as well.

I consider this all a part of travel. It's nice to include where you are from in our travels...but I never thought I'd be including Ireland! I've yet to find any Irish person born since the 17th century, but whatever. And we are people of the world, not just Americans.

Katie,
I know a young adopted woman who recently sent her DNA to ancestry.com. She is a twin and both twins were adopted by the same couple. 30-some years ago. They sent back her results along with the notification that there was a close relative match in their data base and if they would both agree, could contact each other. Well, that person turned out to be a half sister...she has in the past month become aquainted with her entire biological family. She has a lot of half siblings, aunts, uncles, etc. Bio parents are now each married to different people with children from those marriages, etc. Everyone seems very happy to know her and her sister. A real success story.

Anyway...go to Italy and have a magical time!!