I was born in America. My parents and grandparents were all born in America. My great grandparents were all from Mexico. My ancestors are from Spain, Italy, and Saudi Arabia.

I don't speak Spanish but I'm trying to learn. My mom and grandparents speak Spanish. I know my nationality is American because I was born here in America. But I'm struggling to find out what race and ethnicity I am. Please help?

There are DNA tests but they don't use blood as pretty much all your body tissues and fluids contain your DNA. Most use a cheek scraping or saliva. No DNA test will tell you who your specific ancestors are/ Also I feel any DNA test for ancestry purposes is a big waste of money unless you are involved in traditional genealogy research using documents/records.

There are 4 types of DNA. Y, X, Autosomal and Mitochondrial. Y is passed from father to son. Some rare situations a female gets Y from her father but if she does she will not have ovaries or a menstrual period. X is the other sex chromosome and both males and females get X from their mother and in addition a female normally gets X from her father. In other words males are XY and females normally are XX.

Autosomal is what most of your DNA is. You get it 50-50 from both parents and it is the DNA that determines how you look genetically as well as alleles for health issues. However when your parents passed on the Autosomal they received from their parents to you it went through a process called "meoisis" where it was randomly jumbled and recombined. As a results while you got 50% from your mother's side and 50% from your father's, there usually will be a bias in what you inherited from grandmother and grandfather on both sides of the family. In other words you could have received 0 to 50% of your Autosomal from one grandparent. The gap usually isn't that big but it can be. How you inherited any bias will not be how your siblings inherited it unless you have an identical twin.

Mitochondrial is passed from mother to both sons and daughter but only the daughter pass it to the next generation. It is in the connective tissue outside your cells.

For years people have used Y & Mitochondrial testing in genealogy and with each they will assign a person to a Haplogroup and show them the origin of their ancestors going pretty far back in time. However, a person gets each from only one person in each generation they go back. If you are a male you could have both Y & Mitochondrial tested and by the time you got back to your 32 great great great grandparents, 30 of them will not be included in the results.

For the overall testing they use the Autosomal DNA along with the X and they are more compllicated. For instance you and a sibling could be tested at the same time by the same company and your results will not be the same. Example: You could have received more Autosomal from a Norwegian grandfather and your brother or sister could have received more from a Syrian grandmother. Also it has been reported if you go to more than one company the results will not be the same. This is because there are no Haplogroups with Autosomal. The testing is an Algorithim. One might not have or be deficient in certian population samples another has and vice versa which makes the result vary. Also understand they usually are not country specific. They might say so much Scandinavian, so much Slavic, so much from the British Isles, etc. You must have an understanding of history to realize people are not pure anything. Countries have invaded and conquered other countries. Border have changed. When all this happened the original population did not get up and move. They mingled with the newer people. A lot of nations in Europe did not exit 200 years ago. Germany did not become a nation until 1871 and Italy did so in the 1860s; So people from one country very likely will share more DNA with those of another than a lot of people in their own country.

Now how DNA tests can be helppful, if you are involved in genealogy research and if the company they use has some of your cousins going back several generations they can notify you and if you make contact with them and if they are interested, you can collaborate information with each other. There have been people who have been successful this way.

If she died in the last year, It might be here:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/pe/

(Legacy.com is a nation-wide site. Many newspapers contract with them for obits. "pe" is for the Riverside Press-Enterprise)

If you live near enough, you could look for it in old newspapers on microfilm in the library.

The library might be willing to look it up for a fee.

Two notes -
Obits usually come out 0 - 7 days after the death.
Not everyone has one.

Reposting due to the links not working in the original
I am searching for information on my great grandmother.
Her name was Ynosencia Lopez, born circa 1906. She died in 1939 in Phoenix, Arizona, and according to her death certificate, she was born in Mexico to Juan Lopez (mother's name unknown).
She married Mauricio Cordova, who was the informant on her death certificate. Since she was only 33 when she passed, my family has no information about her. I've looked through Mexico's records for a baptism record, but no evidence of her is showing up anywhere, other than her death in Arizona and the baptisms of her children.
It would be great to find out where she was born exactly, as well as any records before she died. As I understand, Arizona was only a territory at this time? According to her surviving family, she was born somewhere in Sonora, Mexico, and was of Yaqui descent.
She was born during the deportation of the Yaqui from Sonora to Arizona. I don't necessarily believe the Yaqui part to be true, but if she was born in Sonora during that political drama, she may not have a baptism record.
Can anyone locate any information about her birthplace or parents?
Here is her death certificate:
http://genealogy.az.gov/azdeath/060/1060...

And again on family search:
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/FL...

Here is Mauricio in 1940 census with their children, But Ynosencia died the year before, leaving him widowed:
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/VY...

The convention many people use, and some here object to, is that you are half of what each parent was, who is half of his/her parents, and so forth.

You have 16 GG Grandparents. you would be 1/16, or 6.25%, of what each was. If two of them were the same thing - French, for instance - you'd be 1/16 + 1/16 = 1/8, or 12.5% French. If three of them, 3/16 and so on.

You may be some percentage "Unknown".

An awful lot of people with a family legend of being part Cherokee - but not, oddly enough, Souix or Navaho - are mistaken.

No one I have ever talked to does it like SoaRical suggested. It is possible to be 1/16 of each of those first 5 and 11/16ths Irish. Since everyone has 2 parents, all the fractions are powers of 2; 1/2, 1.4, 1/8, 1/16 . . .

"American" doesn't count, oddly enough, unless it is "Native American". It would be "Unknown", probably. The longest and non-hispanic European-Americans have been here is just over 400 years; the way the game is played is you go back to the immigrant ancestor. If you know your 3rd great grandfather was white and born in the USA, and thus was "American" chances are his parents, grandparents or great grandparents came here on a ship from a country in Europe. Which one is probably lost in the mists of time, so you are 1/32 "Unknown" from him, not 1/32 "American".

The math is pretty easy - any 4th grader could do it. Knowing the convention is what mystifies most people, and knowing exactly where your 16 GG grandparents, or 32 GGG GPs or 64 GGGG GPs came from could take 30 years of research.

Starting on the web is not the best way. If someone has told you they found their family tree all prepared on a website, please tell that person unless they have verified the information with actual documents/records, they don't knot what they have found is accurate or not. The trees are submitted by the subscribers to the website not some experts who go around willy nilly doing the family history of others. Even when you see the absolute same information on the same people from many different subscribers that doesn't mean it is accurate as too many people copy without verifying.

There are websites that only have family trees and I consider them trash websites. Then there are those with trees and records. Just distinguish the difference between trees and records. Two I like for the amount of records they have online are FamilySearch.org which is entirely free and Ancestry.Com which many public libraries have a subscription to you can use for free. I believe each of these 2 websites have more records online than all the others put together. Now, no way are all records online.

However, you start with living family. Find out what all they might have such as birth, marriage and death certificates on ancestors, family bibles, family photos, letters from elderly relatives and your ancestors, wills, deeds etc. Depending on your ancestors religious faith, baptismal, confirmation, marriage and death records from their churches can frequently be just as helpful if not more so than civil records. Maybe some of your family has certificates from your ancestors' churches.

Interview your senior family members and tape them if they will let you. Chances are they will get into telling stories of days gone by you wouldn't write down but all too often in those stories can be clues that will later help you break through a brick wall in your research. Now and then go back and listen to the tapes again as you very likely will hear things you didn't hear the first time around. Now, not all family stories pan out but still get them as there still can be clues in them even when they aren't exact accurate.

Find out what your local library has in genealogy.

Go to a Family History Center at a Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Church. They have records on people all over the world, not just Mormons. If you find anything in their database you would like to view and print off a copy of an original document, they can order microfilm for you to view for a very reasonable fee. I have never had them to try and convert me nor have I heard of them doing that to anyone else that has used their resources. A lot of their volunteers are not Mormon.

Good genealogy means good documentation. After you have done your preliminary work then use the web as a tool only. Again don't trust family trees online until they are verified with actual records.