Everyone's knowledge about their ancestors is not the same - including even their closest relatives.
There are many, many scenarios that would account for a person not knowing where a quarter of their DNA comes from.
Mike, you're just not taking my point. The speculation was that a person in the southwest USA might know they have Hispanic (Latin American) ancestry, but not expect that it included "Native American", i.e. the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
I'm in North America (Canada) and I do know a bit about stuff in the US. Pretty much everybody there, especially someone with known Hispanic/Latino ancestors, knows perfectly well that there is almost certainly an indigenous element present in their ancestry. For someone in the US with Hispanic ancestors to come from a line descended from Spanish colonizers of whom
none had indigenous spouses would be extremely rare.
Now here's the thing: it turns out these speculations are somewhat right about the person in the TV commercial.
The actor who got the "26% Native American" result is Kim Trujillo. Well of course she knew she had Hispanic ancestry: look at her surname. ... But it turns out that, apparently for cultural reasons common in the US state of New Mexico, where she is from, she thought she was "pure" Spanish:
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/santa-fe-new-mexican/20160703/281977491938545That's quite an interesting read, from an historical and cultural standpoint.
So she had a blind spot, and her test opened her eyes, as the eyes of other New Mexicans are being opened as they learn -- from historical and archaelogical studies to start with -- that they are very unlikely 100% Spanish, and some of them not Spanish at all.
That really is an almost unique circumstance (as you can see from the history explained in that article) -- although I suppose it would apply to anyone with an ancestral component that had been suppressed or denied for cultural (racist) reasons.
What I wish is that people who are considering this test, or commenting on these "ethnicity" results, would read up just a bit on autosomal DNA and what it can and can't tell us -- and what these "ethnicity" components actually mean.
I guess I'll have to get mine done; the paid-for atDNA test kit has been sitting in a pile somewhere on my desk for almost a year. But it will be done at FTDNA, where I have had both my fathers' and maternal grandfather's YDNA tested. As I'm sure I mentioned way back in the thread, that was done (in the case of my mother's family) for a very specific reason - rumours about her grandfather's ancestry and discoveries that confirmed it was not as advertised; and produced a very specific result - no matches where expected, and an unexpected close match as a result of an amazing stroke of luck, leading the ancestral search down a totally different path.
Most people just don't have the kinds of questions (or suppressed facts) in their ancestry that Kim Trujillo had, and an "ethnicity" test just is not going to provide any useful information at all, about actual ancestors or ancestral history. Autosomal DNA is just too random, and the classifications just too unspecific and essentially meaningless.
