It’s Official! I’m a Turner!

So, my whole life I have never known my grandfathers on either side of my family. In fact, the only people to know who these men are the women who birthed my parents, my grandmothers. They also were very tight-lipped their entire lives and never told a soul that I had run across. All of the children on my father’s side were given her maiden name and my mother was given my grandmother’s married name (after being divorced, he’s not the father…). Needless to say, these errors never really stood out to me until later on in life.

For me, trying to understand the why of the errors was more of a curiosity, just wondering type of event and not something that would “change my life forever type moment.” I didn’t need to know my grandfathers for life to be complete, but thought it would be nice to see who they were and what they did. Ancestry gave me a brief glance at this before DNA testing, but it was word of mouth, genealogy in itself is full of holes and lies as people aren’t willing to tell the truth. (Why is that? Why lie? Own up to it!) Enter DNA testing at Ancestry. Spit in a tube, send it off, wait for results. Way back in January of 2016 I had results, some good ones even but they all pointed back to family members I knew about (at least the close ones). Call me intrigued tho as I did have some in there that I didn’t know but gave me enough to do some detective work.

I learned a lot, some has been shared already, some will be shared later, but began some research of DNA and what it means when finding family. I quickly learned that Y-DNA was my key to finding my paternal grandfather and in May of 2016 I did a Family Tree Y-DNA test. These aren’t cheap, so I only tested at the Y-37 level and as it turns out, it was enough. Almost everyone listed (very close matches as well!) were Turners. This was the beginning of my trek to see who I truly am, where I came from and what was set forth all of those long years ago by my kinfolk.

I’ll delve further into this later this year, you’ll get to meet Aunt Betty, T.A., Beckham and a bunch of other Turners “who truly love to love others.”