My father was born in Norway. His mother claimed her family on her father’s side was descended from Eric the Red and said that a symbol on the family “crest” proved it. I remember as a kid being excited by this until my father told me “you know just about everyone in Norway makes this same claim”. : )
I've got Danish and Swedish DNA, Germanic Empire DNA too. Nobody in my family ever knew that. My grandparents were all gone by the time I was born in 1947, so all I had to go on, was the little info there was readily available when I started. My father was born in Holland. My mother in Canada. Both came to the US as young kids who never knew their grandparents either. The majority of my DNA is English, Welsh and southwestern European. My father's tree ends early as most of them were farmers, laborers, servants. It's my mother's side that has the longest connections.
As a kid growing up, my mother used to tell us that our Great-Great Grandmother was a full-blooded Indian. Because she was from Canada, she assumed they were Ojibway. But according to cousins discovered in Canada, she was actually half-Mohawk, and served as the midwife for the neighborhood. Members of the family remember her delivering so and so's children. But my DNA shows no indigenous connection, so who knows for sure.
After my mother died in 1990, I traveled to the village of Picton, Ontario, Canada where my mother was allegedly born, and found references in the public library to some of her family's line. Some of them were considered the pioneers of the county. My mother was never able to become a citizen of the U.S. because no one can find a record of her birth anywhere. Despite knowing her parent's names, their date of marriage, and her grandparent's names, etc., nothing has been found. It's all pretty weird. My mother never really knew her father. My grandmother's marriage didn't last long, and I don't even know if they ever got divorced. I've tried to track down her father's burial site, but it's unknown, as is my mother's aunt, who initially moved to Kentucky with her silversmith husband. He died in the 30's, and at some point in the 50's, she disappeared, but she's not buried in the plot next to her husband. So she either went back to Canada, or remarried, with no record of her new name anywhere.
It's also very frustrating that my uncle's WWII military records (my mother's brother), were destroyed in the big fire at the Military Personnel Records office in St. Louis, Mo., in 1973. He enlisted in the Army, and allegedly served overseas in the China, Burma, India theater, was also allegedly wounded, but there are no records available to confirm any of it. And of course, no one is left on either side of our families to get info from. I'm the last one left in my family. My last sibling died in 2014. It is rather ironic that I can find more connections, and info further out in the tree I go, but not closer to home. You'd think it would be the other way around, but my family was never normal that way, so I take what I can get from places like Geni.com.