holy cow. i sent a message to my nearest dna match. she is adopted.

[csziggy]

25. My only Irish ancestors were Protestants probably brought in by the English

One family was English, the other maybe German (from the name). Both families left Ireland in the 1680s after they bought land from William Penn.

Ireland had an influx of Spanish after the Armada was lost in the storm. Some of the ships that made it to land set down in Catholic Ireland where their crews often settled in and started families with local girls. Remember, Spain at the time had only recently driven out the "Moors" so there was a lot of North African influence throughout the country.

Way before that, Vikings went there - but now they say not all Vikings were what we think of as traditional Scandinavians:

DNA data shows not all Vikings were Scandinavian
By Brooks Hays

Sept. 16, 2020 (UPI) -- In the public imagination, the Vikings were closely-related clans of Scandinavians who marauded their way across Europe, but new genetic analysis paints a more complicated picture.

For the last six years, researchers in Britain and Denmark have been sequencing and analyzing DNA from more than 400 Viking skeletons recovered from dig sites across Europe and Greenland.

The data, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests Vikings were more genetically diverse than researchers thought.



"This study changes the perception of who a Viking actually was -- no one could have predicted these significant gene flows into Scandinavia from Southern Europe and Asia happened before and during the Viking Age," said Willerslev, a professor of evolutionary genetics at Cambridge University.

More: https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2020/09/16/DNA-data-shows-not-all-Vikings-were-Scandinavian/9231600264027/

So although most people think of Ireland as being a land full of gingers with little outside blood, they are as mixed up as most countries.