David Colburn

For most of my life, I wondered about the question every adoptee eventually circles back to: Where did I come from?
Not in the existential sense. I knew exactly where I came from in the ways that mattered. I was raised a Colburn. I carried that name with pride. But biologically, there were blank spaces in the margins. I knew enough about my birth parents and surnames to feel confident I understood the broad outlines. Portuguese would dominate. German would be strong. Spanish would likely be in the mix.
In 2018, curiosity nudged me to order an Ancestry DNA test.
Part of that curiosity had a very specific edge. My father was Edward Winslow Colburn, a direct descendant of Edward Winslow of the Mayflower Colony. Winslow was given to me as a middle name. That was not just a family anecdote. It was a lineage with footnotes in American history. I had always felt deeply connected to that heritage, even as an adoptee, even knowing I did not share it biologically.
So, when my DNA results arrived, I expected to see Portugal and Germany dominating the page.
Instead, I was nearly half English.
Forty-six percent English, plus another 20 percent Scottish and Irish. The Portuguese I was so certain would lead the list showed up at just 10 percent. German was 4 percent.
The science did not link me to the Mayflower, but it suggested that somewhere in my biological past, my ancestors may have walked the same New England soil as the Colburns who trace their roots back to colonial Massachusetts.
It felt less like confirmation and more like a plot twist. The family I had been raised in and the biology I had only recently uncovered suddenly overlapped, at least geographically.
It felt like proximity. A bridge.
That same report showed 8 percent French, 7 percent Native American, 3 percent Spanish, 1 percent Basque and 1 percent African. At first glance, some of those smaller percentages felt like footnotes. Interesting, but peripheral.
Over time, they began to matter more.
The Native American result was tied to Baja and the Southern California coast. That aligned neatly with family research on a Mexican ancestor, Ildefonso Dominguez, born in Sinaloa in 1740, who later traveled north into Alta, Calif., and was associated with the founding of the mission in Santa Barbara. If he settled there and started a family, it creates a clear pathway for Indigenous ancestry from Southern California to enter the line.
It fit the map in my head.
But ancestry testing is not a one-time revelation. It is an evolving database.
As more people submit samples and companies refine their reference populations, the math changes. Broad categories are broken into smaller ones. Regional clusters become more precise.
And as the math shifts, so does the story.
By 2023, I was no longer nearly half English. England dropped to 13 percent. Portuguese ancestry jumped from 10 percent to 37 percent, more in line with what I originally expected. Germanic Europe expanded. Scandinavian ancestry appeared. The Native American percentage dipped by a point and was labeled more specifically as Indigenous Americas, Mexico.
Same DNA. Different narrative.
This past fall, the results sharpened again. Now I am 38 percent Azorean, 1 percent Madeira and 1 percent mainland Portugal. Instead of picturing myself digging through archives in Lisbon for genealogical clues, I now envision scanning whaling ship logs on volcanic islands in the Atlantic.
Years ago, I found an online family tree suggesting that a biological great-great grandfather had been a whaler in the Azores. Further research pointed to migration from the islands to Hawaii during the 19th century, when laborers were recruited for sugar cane plantations. The updated DNA map does not prove that story, but it aligns with it.
The same refinement reshaped my Indigenous results. What once appeared tightly tied to Baja and Southern California now spans much of Mexico and reaches into the Four Corners region. For decades, I have described the American Southwest as my spiritual homeland. I have wandered Chaco Canyon and Canyon de Chelly with a sense of familiarity I could not fully explain.
DNA does not account for longing. But it does illuminate migration.
The territory now highlighted was once part of New Spain, a colonial society where Spanish settlers, Indigenous communities, and enslaved Africans lived within the same system. Africans were brought into Mexico through the Atlantic slave trade, and over generations their descendants became woven into Indigenous and mestizo communities.
That history reframes another persistent line in my results. My African ancestry, once labeled broadly as Cameroon and Congo, is now divided among several West and Central African regions. It remains a small percentage, but it has never disappeared through the updates and is consistent with bringing people from different regions together in a place to facilitate the slave trade.
Seen alongside Indigenous Mexico and Iberian Portugal, it stops looking like a statistical footnote and starts looking like part of a shared colonial story.
Portugal was deeply embedded in the Atlantic slave trade. The same maritime world that connected the Azores to whaling routes and migration also connected West Africa to the Americas through forced labor. Somewhere in my lineage there may have been people caught on both sides of that system.
Inside one genetic profile can reside both movement and bondage, opportunity and coercion. The deeper the science drills, the less simple the inheritance becomes.
In 2018, I was nearly half English. In 2023, overwhelmingly Portuguese. In 2025, predominantly Azorean, with Scotland, northwestern Germany, Indigenous Mexico and West Africa woven through the mix.
The percentages shift. The map zooms in. The narrative evolves.
What has not changed is this: I am forever, gladly a Colburn. Adoption taught me long ago that identity is not reducible to biology. It is shaped by commitment, shared experience and the stories we choose to inhabit.
My DNA has not changed since the day I was conceived. And it hasn’t changed since that test in 2018.
But the story around it has.
And like any good story, it keeps getting more complicated the deeper I look.