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General => Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing => Topic started by: Kloumann on Wednesday 15 January 20 13:34 GMT (UK)
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My DNA test with Ancestry did not throw up any surprises in terms of my ethnicity but my partner's test with Myheritage was extremely surprising. Although her mother was descended from French Huegenots & father descended from East of England, her ethnicity was 42% Scandinavian.
Can anyone explain that please.
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MyHeritage have an overhaul of their ethnicity estimates planned for this year. Don't get too hung up in the discrepancies.
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There have been many threads on this topic.
Have a read of this thread:
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=820580.0
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My Ancestry has variously shown
12% Scandinavian - then 3% Norway - and now 9% Sweden, 8% Norway, 8% Germanic Europe
The same data uploaded to MyHeritage gives me as 53% Scandinavian.
I think MyHeritage has a tendency to exaggerate Scandinavian!!!!
All to be taken with wagonloads of salt ....
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It's incomprehensible to me why anyone would take any notice of those ethnicity estimates, which are a load of rubbish.
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I was born in Kent, both my parents were born in West Hartlepool, all four of my grandparents were born in Hartlepool, and before that none of my ancestors were born in Hartlepool. Who is to say where my ancestry lies? As with the testing companies, it depends what rules you use.
Martin
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As someone else stated the accuracy changes as more people are tested. I do suspect sometimes several people might come up with the same DNA in Scandinavia but when new DNA samples are found it could actually be that that DNA comes from a family that emigrated to Scandinavia from another country.
If you go to https://www.huguenotsociety.org.uk/history.html you will see some Huguenots did indeed emigrate to Scandinavia so you might find you have a DNA connection to them.
Also it's important to note that different DNA companies use different grouping for DNA, some might just put Scandinavian as just Scandinavian but some groups will group Norway, Finland and Sweden as a group Scandinavian. I know that Ancestry, 23andme and most companies will list what the groups consist of. They usually then inform you of the change in grouping like in ancestry Scandinavian then was divided in seperate grouping for Norway, Sweden and Finland.
Kind regards, Joelle
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People think autosomal DNA tests say where you're ancestors lived - they're actually telling you where people related to you now live. They inevitably depend on the size of the population sampled and the specificity of the test. Which company/test to choose depends on what you know of your own ancestry and what you're looking for. Personally as a Brit I would recommend LivingDNA because they got almost exactly what I expected. I have 8/128 GGGGG-grandparents (6.25%) from Cornwall -
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LivingDNA is fine if all you want is ethnicity results. You will have a long wait to get any useful matches there. If you want to use your DNA for serious genealogical research then you should use one of the companies with a significant database.
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I'd agree with that. I have no intention of using it for matching. I wanted the ethnicity results but also the y-dna and mt-dna results which not all do. Like I say it depends what you're looking for. Personally I was really pleased with them.
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My ethnicity estimate came out as : Western Europe 85% British Isles 14% The remaining 1% was possibly East Africa, India or Computer noise (I like that) Overall for a deep Eurosceptic that 85% Western Europe is to say the least worrying.
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It's incomprehensible to me why anyone would take any notice of those ethnicity estimates, which are a load of rubbish.
I don't take them as absolute fact, but in my experience, they can lie close to the paper trail. My husband has one grandfather who was the son of two Russian Jews who emigrated to the US. Even as Ancestry has shifted around the estimates a few times, his portion of European Jewish has remained close to 25%, give or take a few percent. Perhaps us American mutts with far-flung ancestors have more success with it than people whose ancestors were all from nearby places.
Seeing something very different than expected in the ethnicity area can also throw up some red flags. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/books/review/dani-shapiro-inheritance.html
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My son's father in law's estimate is pretty close to his paper trail
Ireland and Scotland 65%
England, Wales & Northwestern Europe 35%
Additional communities
Newfoundland & Southeastern Labrador Settlers
Southwestern Quebec French Settlers
Southern Ontario Settlers
Nova Scotia & Prince Edward Island Settlers
He has ancestors in all of the above groups
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BashLad, I don't believe you're right when you say that the results show where people related to me now live. If that were so it would mean that my ethnicity is 80% North American with a bit of Australian and New Zealand thrown in.
What I am prepared to believe is that it's a statistical analysis of where people (mainly in North America because that's where Ancestry is based and where most of its customers are) say their ancestors came from. But do they know? Just because a family sailed from Liverpool three generations ago does not mean it was originally from Lancashire.
If I could get all my lines back 7 generations I might start to get a picture of their origins. But there was a lot of migration before that, e.g. Huguenots (not all from France). I would need to look 10 generations ago, but how many of us can trace our ancestors back that far -- even assuming all were faithful to their spouses?
Talking of which, I have several matches that neither I nor the other person can explain, so I'm sure there was some hanky-panky going on somewhere (possibly in several places).
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Some further details if anyone is interested:
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=821050.0
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BashLad, I don't believe you're right when you say that the results show where people related to me now live. If that were so it would mean that my ethnicity is 80% North American with a bit of Australian and New Zealand thrown in.
What I am prepared to believe is that it's a statistical analysis of where people (mainly in North America because that's where Ancestry is based and where most of its customers are) say their ancestors came from. But do they know? Just because a family sailed from Liverpool three generations ago does not mean it was originally from Lancashire.
If I could get all my lines back 7 generations I might start to get a picture of their origins. But there was a lot of migration before that, e.g. Huguenots (not all from France). I would need to look 10 generations ago, but how many of us can trace our ancestors back that far -- even assuming all were faithful to their spouses?
Talking of which, I have several matches that neither I nor the other person can explain, so I'm sure there was some hanky-panky going on somewhere (possibly in several places).
At the risk of being patronising this is probably where indigenous european genealogy probably differs from our colonial cousins. There are very few branches of my tree where I don't know where my ancestors lived 7 generations ago. The gaps that do exist are down to illegitemacies I haven't yet cracked, but I suspect they didn't travel from the other side of the planet, or they're Irish. Incidentally my ancestor who was born in Liverpool 5 generations ago did have ancestors there in generations 6,7,8 and 9 but in fairness he was also partly Irish.
When these gene tests test an american and it says 20% of his ancestry is scandanavian they're not saying that based on some sort of self-reporting - they're literally comparing that genome against the population of present day Scandanavia and finding a certain degree of similarity. It's predicated on the assumption that while there may be many Americans, Australians, other New Worlders of Scandanavian descent there aren't going to be many Scandanaivans themselves of New World descent.
When peoples ethnic breakdowns shift that's largely because more people in the Old World have done these tests and they've got a bigger datapool to sample against.
Like I posted in my own ethnic breakdown when I look at my GGGGG-grandparents generation 8/128 lived and died in Cornwall (6.25%). 8/128 lived and died in Suffolk (East Anglia)(6.25%). 4/128 born and died in Cumberland and Westmorland (Cumbria) (3.125%). 65/128 were born in Lancashire (50.8%) (NW England). The test isn't perfect but considering the size of the area they're targeting and the historical depth frankly I'm bloody impressed with them. My last ancestor born in Cornwall was born there in 1870 but it looks like he left his mark in my genes - the testing company doesn't know anything about my tree.
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So, I've noticed your probably Irish rather than the North American I'd assumed based on your post. Well frankly, genealogically speaking, you're unlucky for coming from the part of Europe where it's probably the hardest doing genealogy.