The Truth About AncestryDNA's Ethnicity Estimates
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- Why does your ethnicity estimate on AncestryDNA or other companies change, when your DNA doesn't? Here's the truth about what those estimates are really telling you.
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Unfortunately the companies (not just Ancestry) sell there kits on the phrase "where you're from", which is very, very misleading. These calculators are *similarity calculators* , they do NOT tell one "where you're from." Also, unfortunately very few people bother to look at the uncertainty in their result. Customers all too often do not click through to see their range bars and try to understand them.
AncestryDNA says I am 100% from the country I was born in, the range being 99 to 100%. Now, does that mean to you, it's accurate?
What's it to you anyway? Deal with your own insecurities, never mind others'.
I sent my DNA to one of those ancestry/ heritage sites. I found out that I'm from mixed European descent. The results came back
40 % German shepherd
25 % English bulldog
20 % Irish setter
15 % French poodle
I may have sent it to the wrong place.
Hilarious! Thanks for the laugh! 🤣
I really needed this laugh. Thank you very much!😂😅
😂
LOL!
got to watch those French poodles!
My late wife, was a white, fair haired woman with blue eyes and suspected Irish ancestry. At age 17, already pregnant, she married her first husband. He was a white, fair haired, blue eyed Irishman. Their first child had darkish skin, black hair and Brown eyes. Until and including her death, some 65 years later, no one could explain this anomaly. Just after her death, I got an update on her DNA analysis which showed she was 30% native north American. Problem solved ? Let's hope so. Mark born 09/02/1966, please note.
It is interesting that the parents had recessive genes and that was their phenotype but they had a child with dominant genetic traits like black hair and brown eyes. I suppose it's possible but it must be very rare.
Must have been quite a surprise. It is not impossible for people you describe to have children of differing coloring to themselves. I once saw a picture of a Mexican couple of Mestizo origin and their six children. He was skinny, and pink skinned, she, rather fat and yellow skinned. The children, the two eldest were black skinned, the two middle were yellowish skinned and the two youngest pink skinned, and light haired. I am male, I been married twice, I have four children, 3 from one wife, 1 from the other, all red haired. I am Southern European, both parents dark haired, I am dark haired, and four red headed children. Dna test, I find I am a carrier for red hair, no one in the family knows of any red heads.
@@Ponto-zv9vfthnx for the info, esp abt the Mestizo family. It's strange & fascinating how all the genes mix and appear!
I can think of a very obvious reason.....
Bahahah the mustache, you’re hilarious Amy 😂
I have admit, I had fun with that 😂
@@AmyJohnsonCrow I feel compelled to find a place for a mustache in one of my videos now😂
I still wonder how Ancestry shows for me 72% Germanic German and 5% England whereas MyHeritage shows 34% Scandinavia and 32% England and 17% North- West Europe!
What a big difference!
I've noticed that MyHeritage doesn't seem to break out Scandinavian very well, plus they don't have nearly the number of reference panels that Ancestry has.
They use different algorithms. MyHeritage does not have a White paper of how they determine ethnicity, AncestryDNA does have a White paper. I am 100% of my ethnic group, I am from a small island population, and AncestryDNA gives correct results, and their algorithm can pick out my ethnic group with over 90% accuracy. Now MyHeritage gives me wierdo results, none of which apply to me at least for hundreds of years that I can research. They also seem to give Europeans Ashkenazi Jewish result, and with a lot of Europeans, a Nigerian result. Nigeria is one country out of many in Black Africa, so why Nigeria and not Ghana or Benin or the Congo?
They are making it up and they tell you so in the fine print.
what about my 2% Neanderthal ? where is the sample population for that?
There in museums, and dna libraries. There are quite a few Neanderthal remains, and many of those have been dna tested.
@@GrimmJaw496 It’s recently been shown we all have some Neanderthal in us-usually 1-3% so you are good!
Another great video! 🤗 I'm curious if Ancestry will do a DNA update this year? I know they never announce them ahead of time, but it's always fun to see how our percentages have changed from the previous one.. 🌎 (Like you said.. sometimes they change a LOT.. 😆)
I wouldn't be surprised. My last update was a year ago.
It annoys me when the results show your Irish ancestry, Scottish ancestry, British ancestry but not English ancestry.
You forgot Welsh. Those Celts are easier to separate, on a PCA those British and Irish Celts cluster in the extreme western end of Europe. The English unfortunately cluster with Northern French, Low Countries, and Germany, not so easy to separate.
I did Ancestry and 23&Me. I have genealogy records back to the 1500’s on all 4 grandparents so it was easy for me to check. They were both very close although they gave me less French than I thought I would have. What I liked was they kept sending me updates as their testing was refined and got my French up to where records showed it to be. What totally blew me away was they were able to tell me the exact 3 areas of North America that my ancestors settled in from Europe and that told me that the tests were legit! Because of my records, I didn’t do the tests to find out what I was, I did it to find relatives that are 3rd and 4th cousins where our linkage was back about 100years. I think it’s a great service especially for linking with family and for adoptees who would like to know their ethnicity and find birth relatives.
Yes, I have done dna tests to prove my family tree, I knew my ethnic background, and as for relatives I am related to everyone of my ethnic group.
What do you think when your test shows .1% and .2%?
As a mixed Scottish/Aboriginal man( both grandfathers were Aboriginal- Cree/Qjibwa), this video wad fascinating. 🤔
I’ve always wondered why my percentages keep changing with every update. My family is pretty straightforward. My mother’s side is all Irish and my father’s is Irish and German. I did my DNA with Ancestry and 23andme and the last few updates, suddenly a very small percentage of Finnish is showing up and also a bit of southern European. A bit of a mystery since I know none of my ancestors are from those areas.
The Finnish ancestry might be a stray Viking, although most Finns struck east; Ireland's 9th century Viking invasions were mostly from Norway I think? (Dublin was a Viking city).
Romans and Germans have banged heads since antiquity, trading and sometimes fighting across the Danube. After the Roman Empire fell apart in Europe for several hundred years, it was rebooted in present-day France and Germany by Charlemagne with the backing of Pope Leo who crowned him at St Peter's. This "Holy Roman Empire" split up with France going its own way, but the German side retained that name and maintained intermittent political, economic, religious and social ties with the Vatican and northern Italy in one way or another for centuries- right up to the alliance between Mussolini and Hitler.
(Incidentally, that's why you have a flourishing of Dutch painters lije Renbrandt towards the end of the Italian Renaissance; Peter Paul Rubens a generation or so earlier had gone to Italy to study art, as was common for the "Romanist" painters of German-speaking areas at the time. Rubens' father had also gone to Italy to study law. Some sort of story like that may explain the Italian).
TL;DR: There have always been merchants, artisans, members of the elite, clergy and scholars who have traveled around - a smsll minority of whom wind up settling in or marrying someone from their home away from hime. modern borders are really a modern invention!
@@ellenbryn Thanks!! I kind of like the idea of a “stray Viking”.
Well, most people cannot trace their family back that far, and you never know how accurate the couplings were. There is always doubt. I don't really have that problem because I was born in a small island country, which isn't all that significant for foreign travelers. I haven't found any foreign ancestry at least on paper.
@@Ponto-zv9vf I can trace back 4 generations in most of my lines and 5 generations in 2 lines.
Once I looked at my tree knowing possible ethnicities, I no longer ruled out these areas of the world or the possibility that they were there.
YEP!!! Bingo. I am so glad you are reporting on this. My Bio Dad remarried a Vietnamese women and had Kids with her...and after he had his children DNA Tested and added to the database, my results then changed me to being part Vietnamese. That's when I deleted my account and knew it was no longer accurate. I had a friend write in to Ancestry explaining there was no way they were German she knew from her great grandmother they with polish. So Ancestry took her word and changed the family results.
One "ethnicity estimate" factor that has less to do with sample size is migration. In my case, I expected to see more French in the mix. The same goes for my British Isles background. Remember all of the places that the Vikings invaded? Many of my French ancestors came from Normandy...so that might pump up my Norwegian percentage.
That’s been the tricky thing with ancestral lines in the British Isles - what is “British” and what is “Viking invaders.” That has gotten better over the years.
The French are not a single people. They are like Joseph's coat of many colors. I think that's the point, no nationality is homogeneous ethnically.
English/Welsh/Prussian/Scandinavian here, and I did not have to have any company send me some fabricated ancestry--My parents gave me that fabrication for FREE.
Well, how do you know that your parents are your parents? And they could have guessed your ancestry. Prussians no longer exist.
@@Ponto-zv9vf - Did you not notice my use of the "fabrication"?
So serious question here, when did the Prussians go extinct? They created the German Empire so were around in the late nineteenth century, as well as in the early to mid twentieth and beyond.
If you are talking about flags, they mean next to nothing. I was talking ethnicity, not nationalities.
German "Prussians" aren't the original Prussians. They're just Germans who tried to exterminate the originals and took their land and name. Real Prussians were/are Balts who, though, greatly reduced in numbers, assimilated with some Germans, but more Poles, other Balts. The northeastern section of Poland now has quite a bit of the original Prussian (not German) dna.
@@McGillicuddy-cjv Okay, I stand corrected
Well, you made me laugh when you said, "our ancestry DNA didn't stop at the border." Well, yep... that's because my ancestor didn't stop at the border...........LOL
People changed nationality like part of Denmark went to Germany, and there are Italians, Italian Swiss, in Switzerland.
Yes. I've had a chat with a Chinese man whose friend's DNA results showed some Russian heritage as well as North Indian/ Pakistani heritage. The person who took the DNA test looked typical Han Chinese. Turned out that some of his ancestors (mom or dad's side) were from border regions near Russia while the other side of the family had ancestors from the China-India border.
Your voice is so calming
I really like your map comparison for the change in ethnicity estimates as they gather more data! Great video!
Thank you! I'm so glad you like it!
Going by total ethnicity is ok, but it is the segment DNA ethnicity that is far more important. Finding the lineage history of a segment requires knowledge of the ethnicity, geography, nationality, etc. Gedmatch is a great tool to determine the ethnicity of a segment, and when you combine it with AncestryDNA maps, trees, shared matches, etc, the brick walls can be brought down.
Ancestry tagged my background as England, Scotland and Ireland which matches family lore while one of its competitors said I was half Greek and half Iranian. That on had to have used someone else's saliva.
Many people of Italian descent reside in Switzerland and have for many generations speaking an Italian dialect... which is one of Switzerland's 3 official languages.. .. Nothing unusual about someone who comes up with Italian ancestry, claiming they are from Switzerland ......
Or Brazilians that has, or Americans, or Argentinians as many immigrated elsewhere.
They are not really Italians, they are Swiss people who have similar ancestry to people in Northern Italy, and speak a variety of Romance similar to Northern Italian languages. Italian Swiss are a minor ethnic group compared to Swiss Germans and Swiss French.
@@Ponto-zv9vf so..... People in Northern Italy are not Italians????There are approximately 3 different dialects spoken in Southern Italy, and a different dialect in Northern Italy... That is like saying that the people who speak "low German" instead of "high German" are not really German at all...They might disagree...
My DNA shows a small percentage of Scadinavian/Danish ancestry. I assumed it was from the so called Vikings who had descendants throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland where the great majority of my ancestors came from. However, I discovered, on Ancestry, a branch of my family going back to Norman English who in turn were descended from Vikings who settled in Normandy and then conquered England in 1066.
If you found that from someone’s tree on Ancestry, you’ll want to go back and verify it. Once you get back that far, it’s mostly wishful thinking.
It could be. The Normans were of Scandinavian origins and settled in France, but over time, some Normans could of had zero Scandinavian and 100% French ancestry, and any range in between.
Great Video Amy
Thank you, Brian! I appreciate the kind words 😁
For anyone reading, and maybe this clarifies, maybe this doesn't, but when you take a DNA test, it is absolutely required to refrain from analyzing your results from a modern, "the world as we currently know it" perspective. Do not look at the map and say, "Oh! I have ancestors from X country!" Rather, look at the map as having different regions. Its also an absolute MUST to understand borders, migration, history, trade routes, immigration and how people moved from land to land, not nessessarily from country to country.
For example, You may have the regions of Australia and/or New Zealand highlighted in your results. That COULD mean you have connections to Aboriginal, Celt, Anglo Saxon, or Norse cultures/ancestors. When the British Empire gained control of Australia/New Zealand, they used that land to send thousands of their criminals, defects and those banished out of the British Isles.
Another example...If "Jewish" shows up in your DNA, it would NOT nessessarily mean your ancestors are from Israel/Middle East. That data could also mean that your ancestors are from Central Europe. If that is the case, youd want to start looking into WWII history and the Holocaust to see if you have any connections to those victims.
Norse Viking ties? You may very well also have Anglo Saxon, Pict or Celt connections.
Another example...
I knew that my results would come back with Swiss German, French and maybe a few other European regions. However what really surprised me was the Scots Irish and Native Durangan (Mexican) connections. With more digging, historical records, historical timelines and countless hours of diving into Ancestry, FindAGrave, Google, obituary records, newspapers and world history, ships records and other sources, I finally tracked down the family I was looking for.
I hope maybe this all helps someone else. Stay open minded!
Well done. This is such a touchy subject for people who don’t understand the science. (2nd only to how to properly clean a headstone)
Thank you! (Speaking of cleaning headstones, I've been so tempted to make a reaction video about the woman who is using what looks like pink oven cleaner... but I'm not sure my blood pressure can take it!)
I have never cleaned a headstone. My parents have a metal marker in a lawn cemetery. The thing to remember is it's an estimate, and you don't inherit dna from all your ancestors.
If I believe Ancestry half my ancestors who came to New England in the 1600's were Norwegian. I think not.
I'm curious -- when did you last look at your estimate? Mine used to be heavily Swedish and Norwegian, much to the chagrin of my Scottish ancestors! Ancestry seems to have figured out a lot of the Scandinavian/British groups in the last couple of updates.
Not to mention fluid borders. I asked a cousin why our ancestors had gone from France to Germany. She said THEY hadn't moved, but Germany had taken possession of the part of France where our family lived.
What if they came from the Orkneys or the Shetland Islands. The Scandinavian ancestry of Scots and Irish is mostly from Norway.
Great explanation!
Thank you! I hope it was helpful!
Adoptee.. my birth mother is 87 and I’m still her greatest shame. No getting around that. She means nothing to me but the knowledge that someone has those feelings towards me is wearing.
I dither on whether to do one of these tests hoping to find family on my biological father's side. Maybe hoping that side of the family is better than my mothers. Sounds harsh but is the reality. Hope with time you can put aside that information about your birth mother's feelings and firmly embrace the best in your life. I need to take my own advice.😆
Well, she is entitled to view that pregnancy and birth however she wants, it's her business. This may seem strange to you, ,but I am not adopted and both my parents are my birth parents. I was hoping to find I wasn't their son, as I never liked them, they're dead now, and I haven't changed my mind.
@@judysocal8682 People are flawed, mostly devils with little good.
I just wonder why I have Denmark, Finland, and Sweden in my list, but no Norway
I've done 3 dna tests - Ancestry. MyHeritage & 23&Me. My Scandinavian results are all over the nap, pun intended. ☺️ Keep waiting for MyHeritage's supposed update to see how it changes....
Northumberland is classed as Scotland according Ancestry. They think north of Hadrians wall is Scotland when it’s not it’s English
Your dna ethnicity results change so much because of your mixed origins and the mixture is from similar ethnic groups. It is difficult to separate English from Northern French, Belgium and Netherlands ancestry. There is a lot of overlap. My dna is very specific ethnically because I am from a small island population and for many generations, a population created by a small group of founders. Yes, each company uses different methods to work out ancestry, and I only fault them on how accurate the results are to my actual ancestry. For me 23andMe goes too far back in time, and gives me ancestry not applicable to me at least in the last 500 years. MyHeritage is totally indiscernible, and strange. AncestryDNA is on the spot, 100% of my actual ancestry, FTDNA is 99% correct. I may be as mixed as every other human but I have been of my ancestry for as long as I have gone back in the records.
The point is if you are recently mixed you'll get some odd results. I mean if you are Irish, English, German... so on.
I have been working with someone born in England who found roughly 25% of his admixture was from native American and/or Spanish origins. He matched my father, so I knew he was Mexican, which was a total surprise to him! We believe we have been able to figure out who his paternal grandfather was using his shared matches and traditional genealogy.
For all forty-something years of my life, I believed I was part Cherokee. Mom said Dad was about 25%. Well, I discovered that "Dad" isn't even dad.😅 we shared 0% DNA. Then I discovered that my cousin is also my brother because we have the same father. His mom is my mom's little sister. I was born out of wedlock and was a "dirty secret" that never came out until they were both deceased.
I gained 2 brothers, and lost 3 sisters 😅 my aunt is my stepmom, my cousin is my brother and I'm still confused. 😅
I love the Ancestry communities. They are helping to separate and track each of my parents' lines back.
The communities can be awesome! I've found them much more helpful than the ethnicity estimate.
Statistically, the bigger the sample size, the more accurate the sample. When my nephew sent me the sample kit years ago. It had Scandinavia, several countries combined under Western Europe, and Ireland with Wales. Now it has individual countries broken down even further.
I wish they’d do an update, nothing has been refined in over a year.
Ancestry does a strange thing to prioritize some of the estimates. For instance mine shows i have a higher "Scottish" percentage than "French." 16 percent and 10 percent respectively. But if i click on Scottish it tells me my actual range is from 0 to 30% while my French is 0 to 34%. I'm of Acadian heritage from one grandmother, my dad shows up as 44% French and 12% "scottish." It seems like they should prioritize the French as I'm also connected to the Digby Acadian community in the community section.
And then as to that whole Scottish result being higher than my father's- well my mother's estimate shows 4% Scottish - ok so 12 plus 4 is 16. The issue here is that according to the parental breakdown for my mothers DNA, she inherited this 4% from her mother, whose ancestors all were Germans from the Danube going back to the 1600s.
I’ve heard others say that their Scottish percentage got more out of whack in the last update.
@@AmyJohnsonCrow good to know. I'll also say most people who buy these kits don't use the most important feature imo - looking at who they match w and comparing it to their family tree. I learned my maternal grandfather was not who everyone thought it was. Through sleuthing I was able to find who it likely was. Told my mom, none of our surviving family had any clue. But it made total sense in hindsight!
You're misinterpreting the error bars.
They run these tests repeatedly.
They will end up with something like a bell chart with upper and lower limits of, say 0% to 34%, with results clustered round a point which almost certainly isn't half way between and falling away towards the limits. They report that point of concentration, it's nothing about "prioritising" anything..
@@andyleighton6969 well in that case, they are misrepresenting the data as presented, since that cluster is not visible to me. Another issue is it says I inherited all my "Scottish" from my father's side, but I have more than my father. So I suppose according to this information about how they cluster the data that's just a matter of a margin of error.
@@caballero_del_arboles They don't show you the clustering, but if you read the bumph that's clearly what they do.
All this stuff is good for a laugh, and it's cleared a couple of logjams for me, but it's not to be taken seriously.
My favourite is the "traits" thing.
On "leadership" I score as low as you go.
In the meanwhile, my Queens Commission as an infantry officer is in a frame upstairs, and I retired from the police as an Inspector.
Definitely not a leadership bone in my body.😉
I think some of it they just make up.
Good video. Explains it concisely and clearly.
With respect to myself, my ethnicity match 68% Scottish, 42% Irish) is more or less what I expected, what with being Scots-born of some Irish extraction, and even some of the latter will actually be Ulster Scots and therefore actually Scottish.
I'm glad you liked the video!
How does your DNA look on genomelink?
I never considered my ethnicity estimates to be much more than entertainment. My matches and shared matches have been the real valuable information for confirming research.
Yes - the ethnicity estimate is pretty much the least useful part.
I think it is more important for adoptees, and people who don't know their actual ancestry. Many Australians know they have British and Irish ancestry but are not sure, and other groups have immigrated to Australia like German speakers from Germany itself or places once controlled by Germany. They don't really know.
All my matches are of my ethnic group either fully, or partly.
@@Ponto-zv9vf I can agree sort of agree with that. I have a friend who’s adopted and she had exhausted all attempts to find out about her heritage so she tried a DNA test. It did give her a good idea of her ethnic background but it was still communication with her strongest shared matches that got her closest to her actual parentage. She wasn’t able to nail it down to her actual parents but now she knows that half of her background is Croatian on her father’s side. She still has no info on her Mother.
One of the most valuable and thoughtful gifts I ever received. I discovered that the generations-deep story of Cherokee blood on my paternal side was completely without merit. Scots-Irish and English on dad’s side with 1% West African, and 100% Norwegian/Swedish on my maternal side as we suspected.
I sometimes wonder if the “1% West African” is a go-to for little bits that can’t be pinned down precisely yet (this was in 2018) or if there is real basis in that result? I’d love to know either way. I definitely don’t look Scandinavian or even remotely west European for that matter.
1% of anything could be noise. It would be so far back that you likely wouldn't find the origin of it. If you haven't looked at your estimate lately, you might want to take a look and see what your current estimate is.
It isn't strange how you look. I have seen many dna results of people whose ancestry is predominantly Northern European, and they don't look Northern European, I mean they are not tall, not blond, and not blue eyed, and their facial structure is definitely not Nordid.
My mother did her test with Ancestry. I did mine with MyHeritage and FTDNA. Mum got three regions. Sweden, Finland and Denmark . I got 90% Scandinavia and 8% Finland. All om my matches come from Scandinavia down to 80 cM.
And it make sense because all these companies test autosomal components from the last 500 yrs or so.
If I want to know where my ancestors lived a thousand years ago in the Viking age or back in Roman Empire autosomal testing is not adequate. Then you have to look for haplogroups and haplotypes.
One thousand years ago, all Europeans had the same ancestors. Pedigrees collapse occurs with the passage of time. Of course we don't inherit dna from all our ancestors.
One thing they forget in these tests is that they should try to get access to archaeological data and consult historians. Comparing only to modern populations will always be wrong.
Another thing I noticed is that Myheritage sets the DNA test according to what you write in the family tree. I did a test and uploaded the data to 4 platforms. In 3 they gave close results, with changes easily explained by the variation of comparative data from each database or by separating some groups that other tests classified as equal. But in Myheritage where a relative had created a family tree "not very accurate, by the way" the result was completely altered to match the tree. When I included my father's DNA, which matches on the other platforms, the result appeared similar to the others.
So besides the tests themselves, we have to worry about the accuracy and reliability of the tests that can change on purpose if they know some information about you.
The problems with ancient populations is that they no longer exist and that they had their own admixtures. I use G25 coordinates and the Yahaduo program to work out ancient ancestry, but I only use groups I think are not so admixed. Ancient groups I mean European hunter gatherers, Neolithic farmers and Steppe proto Indo-European herders, the main contributors to modern European ethnic groups.
Thank you.
my first ancestry profile was way off - i'm asian/american indian - but my dna supposedly said i was mostly polynesian - but within a year it came back almost exactly what i first expected - (the polynesian was gone) - subsequent revisions haven't changed much from that - - i know that minorities should expect less accuracy since the bulk of early customers were white - but that was ridiculous
Some ethnic groups are quite easy to discern like Native Amerians and East Asians, others like Northwest Europeans are somewhat blurred.
@@Ponto-zv9vf - do you know this from authority - or are you basing this on your intuition
oh I really need your help
Thanks for this information. I did a DNA test with them two years ago Maybe I need to have it checked again. 🤔
You don’t need to test again. They’ll update the test you already did.
@@AmyJohnsonCrow Thanks for letting me know that. I don't have a membership with them even though I keep getting their emails. I would have had one but they changed my credit card for that without my permission and that really infuriated me even though I got them to reverse the change.
I took ancestry this month. Berber and Arab father and mother respectively. I have African grandmothers from Sudan and Chad. I am assigned based on autosomal DNA 28 % Nilotic and 13% Ethiopia. My grandfathers DNA contributed to 19 % Arabic peninsula and 9% North Africa Morocco. It is helpful that I know a head of time where grandmothers are from. Otherwise I would be so confused.
Really looking forward to ancestry DNA’s “biggest update ever.” I hope they can reconcile my estimates this time. My father and I have tested, although we share 50% of our DNA, the test says I inherited 20% Germanic Europe from him. My father has 0% Germanic Europe. It seems that what is being labeled on my test as Germanic is getting labeled on his test as something else.
Interesting!
DNA is inherited randomly from each parent; if your Father is half English and half Swedish, the half of your DNA you inherit from him could in theory be ALL English, All Swedish, or anything in between
Add dilution to the mix over generations and it means you only actually inherit from about 160 of your ancestors.
DNA does not tell you "where you came from" thousands of years ago, good for a couple of hundred.
My DNA is basically Anglo Scottish, with a dash of Welsh and Scandiwegian.
However as I carry a subclade of the R1b haplogroup, as do the majority of male Brits, I know that "thousands of years ago", in fact somewhere around five thousand, my direct male ancestor was riding around the Pontic Steppe of the Ukraine.
My ancestry is rather interesting & one branch would be greatly helped with accurate DNA matching: my maternal grandfather's mother's family. They were Yankee sea captains -- one relative has a cameo in that 19th century classic "Two Years before the Mast" -- but the documentation about them fails before their arrival to North America is reached. I was able to trace them back to an ancestor who was alive c. 1700.
The apparent answer would be to claim they are from Britain, as were most people in New England at that time. However, there is a family story that said woman -- my maternal grandfather's mother -- claimed to have been Native American in a way that suggests she wasn't: it was better for her to claim that ethnicity than whatever it was. And those Yankee sea captains occasionally took spouses from other parts of the world, such as the South Pacific. Further, I have been told there were African-American sea captains. So was she actually part Polynesian, part Black, part Native American -- or something else? It's been a minor mystery for me.
I had to laugh at the first DNA report from Ancestry: it gave me a 5% match with SW Africa, around the area of modern Namibia. It's not that I would be embarrassed to have African blood; it's that AFAIK slavers never reached that far south in Africa for their victims. A later revision removed that match.
I didn't do the Ancestry DNA I plan to but from the one I took and my research, I believe my female ancestors moved from the middle east up into Northern Europe before coming across the ocean to the Americas. Ancestry would probably catch my Arab grandmothers and may be they were Jewish.
I'd been researching both sides of my family decades prior to having my DNA identified via ancestry. I found the results to reflect my research.
In 2014 I was 99.2 % British/Irish & 0.8% Middle East.
Imagine being raised as "Irish," protestant, but with an Irish surname. Then the latest estimates offer almost no Irish at all, and what little there is, is on the wrong side of the family.
Thanks for the great, easy to understand explanation. It will help a lot of people!
Because they can only compare to the database clients they tested, not a real number. Since most tested are done by with N. Americans qnd Europeans the result is very limited to those wreas.
The reference panels are not made up of people who first took an AncestryDNA test. On the other hand, the AncestryDNA "communities" (which they've now renamed "DNA journeys") are based on people who have taken an AncestryDNA test.
There are quite of lot of results from all over the world available on various databases that it shouldn't be a problem. Lots of countries have genetic databases like the UK genetic database. There are lots of people living in Britain and Ireland who are not ethnic British or Irish. The limitation is the place of birth may not match ethnic group.
In other words a ' B.S.'
It is accurate for me, I don't have a surname that belongs to my ethnic group, but I am 100% of my ethnic group and all my relatives are of my ethnic group. So I don't think it BS
So which would you suggest is best for ethnicity?
Generally, AncestryDNA seems to be the best at splitting out UK vs Scandinavian, and they do have the largest number of reference panels. Honestly, though, the ethnicity estimate isn't the most informative part of a DNA test. You get better information from the matches and from AncestryDNA's DNA communities (now called "DNA journeys.")
@@AmyJohnsonCrow Thankyou
I was 100 European then I did it again and I was 98%
That is still quite a lot.
@@Ponto-zv9vf true
What I find interesting... is that I 22% of my DNA apparently traces to Scandinavia (with some from my maternal and paternal side) ... and I have quite a few matches with people who seem to be totally Scandinavian... but I have gone back about 7 generations...with no traces of this. So I suspect that my Irish great grandfather (I am only 5% Irish)... may actually have Viking ancestry...and on my mother's side.... I found that my ancestors from back in the 1600s... lived close to an area that was subject to Viking raids in the 800s.... so that may be the source of that DNA on her side. Interesting to think about... but without records..impossible to prove...but fun in any event
22% is like a grandparent. And you have relatives from Scandinavia. Usually having ancestry from say Finland gives no Finnish matches, but almost a quarter and does give matches, you need to do some checking about your grandparents. The Scandinavian ancestry of Scots and Irish is small and rather broken into small segments.
Ancestry got two of my ethnicities correct. Just not the percentage for one of them.
My great-grandfather am I biological father's side was 100% French. His parents were born there and died there. However my ethnicity only says I'm 3%. I should be a lot higher than that.
The other one they got right was my African. One of my maternal fourth grade grandparents what's a freed slave. His children were all mulatto.
You don't inherit dna from your grandparents and their parents exactly like the math says you should. I mean 25% from each grandparent, it can actually vary from 20% to 30%. Your great grandparents should be 12.5% from each, but it varies in actuality.
It’s ascam.
You haven't tested, so how can you say something that you are ignorant about.
When I did my first DNA with Ancestry I got Scandinavian which is so off base. I am mostly Irish-Italian with a small percentage of Scottish. I like seeing the dna changes but I am not holding out any hope for MyHeritage.
Vikings invaded Ireland. That could explain Scandinavian heritage.
@@woodruffashbourne8372 It was a trace region I was surprised by and it went aways after the first update.
They just want your dna
I have done 5 different DNA tests, they are all fairly similar. All of these test have not really changed either.
MyHeritage is way off. 23andMe goes too far back, and I doubt it's accuracy. AncestryDNA and FTDNA are spot on.
@@Ponto-zv9vf I have done Family tree DNA, living DNA,GEDmatch, My heritage, and Mytrueancestry
Amy I am not a biologist and neither are you. From what I have read about biology gene markers are combinations of nucleotides within a chromosome that are found with a given number of individuals within a population. They are the product of genetic mutation (chromosomes crossing over). Gene mutation happens all over the world and there is nothing preventing individuals in two ethnic groups mutating (producing) the same "gene markers." The idea that gene markers equate to a DNA fingerprint is false. This is called typological thinking. Population geneticists in the mid twentieth century came to the conclusion that the opposite is true - population thinking. typological thinking (archetypes) is intuitive to humanity and Ancestry is not going to sell many DNA analysis kits if they discredit this thinking.
Well you said it. You are not a biologist. You said things which are wrong, an opinion of yours. There are bits of dna called SNPs which vary in different human groups. For instance it is unlikely that a Yoruba Nigerian would have the SNPs for blue eyes, or the SNPs that make a person lactose tolerant. Each ethnic group is created by people breeding within that group over generations, so they end up with the same type of SNP changes. So it is easy to separate the sheep from the goats or Norwegians from Greeks, Chinese Han from Japanese. The problems are with ethnic groups that have interbred over many generations like the English and the Germans, or the Southern Italians with Greeks. But with a large database you can separate with some degree of accuracy most ethnic groups. New Worlders, Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians are recent etthnicity composed of a number of origins and finding their ancestry can be difficult due to this mixing over generations in those nations.
@@Ponto-zv9vf "Darwin made a radical break with the typological tradition of essentialism by initiating an entirely new way of thinking. What we find among living organism, he said, are not constant classes (types), but variable populations. Every species is composed of numerous local populations. Within a population, in contrast of a class, every individual is uniquely different from every other individual. This is true even for the human species with its six billion individuals. Darwin’s new way of thinking, being based on the study of populations, is now referred to as population thinking. This approach was congenial to most naturalists, who in their systematic studies had discovered that species of animals and plants showed as much (and sometimes far more) variation and uniqueness as the human species. The gradual replacement of essentialism by population thinking led to long-lasting controversies in evolutionary biology... Population thinking is one of the most important concepts in biology: It is the foundation of modern evolutionary theory and one of the basic constituents of the philosophy of biology." (Mayr, 2001, What Evolution Is, p.75)