Ethnicity Estimate turmoil

[tvc]

My friend has recently tested on Ancestry and has been given the Ethnicity Estimate of 50% Great Britain 26% Eastern Europe, 13% West Europe, 7% Finnish/Russian and smaller amounts of others. They now have a very real concern that their father is not their real father and are upset.

I don't think that's what it is telling them, as I know the weight that should be assigned to this. However, I want to point them in the direction of a written paper to help them understand exactly what it means to allay their fears. They are not keen to share this with family members and it is not helping that so far they have no DNA matches to their father's side or none that can be identified.

Can anyone advise or PM me privately to discuss.
Many thanks
tvc

[davidft]

If your friend is worried about the ethnicity results he got back and his father is still alive then the answer would be for his father to test and then by comparing how many centimorgans they share in common to get a definitive answer. To be father son it should be approximately 3000 out of approximately 6000.

However this is the problem with doing these ethnicity DNA tests and that is they are not accurate enough to give the predictions they sometimes do with "absolute certainty". Also added to this companies from time to time change the classifications they use so your ethnicity inheritance can change overnight - not very scientific is it. My ethnicity estimate is now quite different to my father's but he is 100% my father, the problem seems to be in my case they don't know how to classify what use to be my British inheritance and so now just call it western European whereas my father's is still classified as British.

Also if both father and son test then you can upload the results to Gedmatch.com where it does detailed breakdown and comparison along the chromosomes

If you look back at the many, many posts on this thread you will find this is not an unknown problem, although a word of warning not everyone accepts everyone else's interpretation

[hurworth]

If your father is from a smallish family then you can get very few matches on that line, simply because there's just not so many people descended from your mutual ancestors.   

We have a genealogy bottleneck at my patrilineal gtgtgt-grandfather who was born in the 1770s.  He was the ONLY child of his parents to have legitimate children.  One of his brothers had a couple of daughters in India but they don't appear to have had surviving any descendants.  His much younger wife, my gtgtgt-grandmother was the same.  It appears that none of her siblings have any descendants either.

The ONLY place I have found any matches with patrilineal cousins (so all descended from this  patrilineal gtgt-grandfather) is at MyHeritage, so I would strongly recommend trying another database or two such as FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage.  You can upload from Ancestry to both of them.  Even if there's still no matches I wouldn't jump to any conclusions.  I waited for over a year for the first match up this line - it still only confirmed things back to the gtgt-grandfather.  New matches in the future may take it back further.

[Yonks Ago]

https://elizabethonheiber.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/comparing-ethnicity-estimates/

[tvc]

Thank you david, hurwood and yonks for looking at this. Both parents are deceased and Y-DNA is not an option as the person is female. I have uploaded her DNA to Gedmatch already and the Admixture results are similar.

It's the 26% Eastern European that is bothering her as the family are many generations from the North of England and according to the records, nowhere else. Can anyone advise what the 26% Eastern European might be telling her with respect to her ancestry.

Many thanks

[Yonks Ago]

Hi there,
Lets not forget the Ethnicity goes back 1000's of years.
A good link to read
https://www.ancestry.com/dna/ethnicity/eastern-european

My results I'm 90% British..6% Asia Minor..3% East European and 1% South American.
And I'm a 3rd generation Australian..

cheers

[davidft]

Thank you david, hurwood and yonks for looking at this. Both parents are deceased and Y-DNA is not an option as the person is female. I have uploaded her DNA to Gedmatch already and the Admixture results are similar.

It's the 26% Eastern European that is bothering her as the family are many generations from the North of England and according to the records, nowhere else. Can anyone advise what the 26% Eastern European might be telling her with respect to her ancestry.

Many thanks

As the parents are both deceased the next step I guess is to ask if the tester has any siblings who could do an autosomal test. There is a chart in the video at 3.20 in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6yme0t-ZA

which shows how many centimorgans full siblings etc should share with your friend.

I understand the concern about the high percentage East European but in the absence of any other information I would not dwell on it because of the inherent weaknesses of these tests and the sometimes less than scientific means they use. When ftDNA reclassified their ethnicity groups a lot of my British inheritance suddenly became Western European for no apparent reason and yet my father's remained the same.

Another thing you can do is play around with the ethnicity tools on Gedmatch as they have several different ones and the different results they throw up may mean something.

Failing that you may want to look at Living DNA but it is expensive (although getting cheaper all the time) and not something I would invest in at the moment  https://www.livingdna.com/en-gb