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In answer to your question, sort of.
For me Ancestry’s ethnicity is getting more accurate with each iteration.

Thanks for the interesting reflections. I guess "sort of" is some sort of endorsement of the approach.

And I agree that Ancestry's latest ethnicity calculations are impressive.

I have a particular case I'd like to ask about please.

I want to try to identify my maternal great grandfather. My grandmother was adopted (in Melbourne, Australia), her birth mother was named on her birth documentation but her father was not.

Using the Leeds method I have been able to separate out my maternal & paternal sides and identify matches descending from my maternal grandmother and grandfather. I was able to find DNA matches that pointed to sisters of my great grandmother and so identify her. But so far no luck on finding usable matches for my great grandfather.

Like others here, I don't give much credence to ethnicity results. But feeling a bit desperate, I decided to try to use ethnicity at FTDNA, My Heritage and Ancestry to try to at least identify where he may have come from. They all have different groupings of course, but results aren't too different in my case. This is how my logic went:

1. My ethnicity is mixed between England, Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia/Northern Europe.

2. My dad's family migrated to Australia 170 years ago from eastern England, his father's family from Yorkshie where there was once a Viking population. This is roughly confirmed by my having roughly 50% from UK & Scandinavia/Western Europe.

3. If I take those percentages out of my ethnicity, the remainder is about 20-25% Scottish & 25-30% Irish (varies with each company).

4. My known maternal ancestors come from Ireland & Scotland, with the theoretical mix being:

• 31.25% Irish
• 6.25% Scottish
• 12.5% unknown (my missing great grandfather)

5. The only way to achieve something like my actual percentages (in #3 above) is for the missing great grandfather to be Scottish.

Of course the numbers don't add up neatly, but all three companies give (broadly) the same result.

My question is: has anyone else used an approach like this and later (when they had identified their ancestor) found the calculation gave a reasonable result (or didn't)?

Thanks.

I'd like to continue this discussion with an uodate and another question.

ThruLines now shows the second x Great Grandfather Hugh Jones who was missing before, plus his father. Trouble is, my tree shows Hugh Jones b1812 in Nefyn, and his father Hugh Jones, whereas ThruLines has Hugh Jones b1810 in Anglesey and his father Edward Jones.

I am not certain of my identification, I am just trying it out to see if ThruLines gives me any matches. I think the Anglesey identification is possible but less likely.

So ThruLines has over-ridden the tree I have entered and used the trees of other Ancestry users. Last time I criticised Ancestry I found that I was a major part of the fault, so I want to be slow to criticise again.

But shouldn't it take my tree as its starting point?

Any thoughts? Thanks

That is a helpful video. Thanks.

Hi brigidmac, thanks for your thoughts. I find several things you say interesting - I'll need to think about adding "also known as" and suffixes. I presume the comments you suggest also appear on the timeline?

But your post was helpful in another way. Prompted by what you said, I went into the tree again and found I had stuffed up how I showed John's parents. So I corrected that and now John's dad appears in ThruLines where he didn't before! I presume his parents will appear in time.

I don't know how long this error was there. Perhaps it happened when I was testing different things as outlined above.

But for now, I think the matter may be resolved, and I'll humbly apologise to Ancestry and admit at least a major part of the problem was me!!