My DNA from that well known website!!

[brigidmac]

How far up are the missing father's on your tree .
Some of us have had success from knowing how to triangulate results ...well worth reading some of the stories on DNA board .

+ posting any of your conundrums.

Ancestry now publishes affiliation orders from some areas so you may be able to find the putative father then run his surname thru thru your shared matches .

To me it looks as tho your results are getting closer to matching your paper trail 🤠

[plimmerian]

All new results in my DNA again 

England & Northwestern Europe 71%

Wales 15%

Ireland 7%

Scotland 5%

And a newbie Cornwall at 2%

The parental percentages have also changed but my head’s too fried at the moment, to process!

[ValJJJ]

As others have said - ignore the ethnicity results.  They mean very little because they are based on very limited databases.  Say they are comparing your DNA with 100 people in Sweden, 100 in France, it's just too low to be meaningful.  Never mind the ancestry of those people in the samples.  Just because they've lived there for a few generations doesn't mean their ancestors did.

Twins have wildly different ethnicity results so that reveals how flawed these results are. Just focus on DNA matches because they are really useful.

Ethnicity is just a marketing wheeze to sell more kits.

[Albufera32]

You see the exact size of all the reference groups on Ancestry.

Most European ones are 2000.

Cornwall is one of the new regions added in the last update.

Whilst some of the marketing waffle is just that - blurb to sell more kits,it isn't all total rubbish.
If you go onto Ancestry and read how the assignment of regions is done (written by the science people not the marketing ones) it makes much more sense. What that also does is tell you what it really means.

My regions for example are (circa Jul 2024)

 85% Scotland, 10% Ireland, 2% Iceland, 2% France and 1% Norway.

What that actually means is that 85% of the DNA segments Ancestry uses to define ancestral origins is more common in the Scottish Reference panel than any other. 10% is most common in the Irish panel than any other regional panel, and so on.

The 2% Iceland is new (as it is for everyone, it was only added with this update). Because it is new, the Iceland Reference panel isn't as large as most of the others, so a small group with similar DNA can have a disproprtionate effect on the results. So what does my  2% Iceland really mean?

It doesn't mean I "2% Icelandic." It doesn't even mean that segment is more common in Iceland than elsewhere. It just means that a small part of my DNA is more common in the reference panel for Iceland  than anywhere else. That's all.

[ValJJJ]

Great explanation thanks.

[candleflame]

Your head may be fried plimm, but it’s fascinating for us to read, so thank you for sharing.

[Millmoor]

i do think it is worth looking at the ranges provided for each ancestral region to add some kind of perspective. In my case for Norway it states " Your ancestral region estimate is 2% but it can range from 0% to 5%". For Germanic Europe it states " Your ancestral region is estimate is 5% but it can range from 0% to 11%".

William