New ethnicity splits on Ancestry

[Top-of-the-hill]

  My recent update shows 43% England and N W Europe. Why are they lumped together? It is accurate on where my English ancestors lived.
  There is also 23% Germanic Europe, though with a wide % range offered, and this puzzles me. Perhaps it is all those Anglo-Saxon ancestors!!

[melba_schmelba]

  My recent update shows 43% England and N W Europe. Why are they lumped together? It is accurate on where my English ancestors lived.
  There is also 23% Germanic Europe, though with a wide % range offered, and this puzzles me. Perhaps it is all those Anglo-Saxon ancestors!!

Because English and north west Germans, Dutch, southern Danish, Belgians, north French are all very genetically similar. They could do a better job at separating them but as far as I know there has been no similar country wide DNA study of Holland, Germany or Belgium yet so they often have a large percentage of their ancestry marked as English, no doubt much to their annoyance . There was a DNA study of France a couple of years ago which Ancestry may have incorporated, but it was flawed as it just used data from blood tests done for medical reasons and only based on birth place and having a French sounding name, so it likely included people with a lot of Spanish and Italian genetics which comprised a lot of the immigration to France 1870s-1970s so perversely a lot of Italians on Ancestry suddenly became French .

[sirsimon]

is 35% scottish a lot to have genetically?

It appeared with the update

[sirsimon]

Does anyone know how often these updates happen?

Is it randomly every few months or once a year?

[LizzieW]

Mine has totally changed and I've gone from having 1% Jewish ancestry to 3%!  It also shows 14% Scottish but as far as I know the only Scottish ancestry I have is my 4 x g.grandfather, and his ancestors which I've found as far back as his grandparents on both sides of his family.  Whether that adds up to 14% I have no idea.  It seems a lot of DNA to me, but what do I know?  Apparently, I am only 69% English and Northwestern Europe, which is a surprise as, apart from my Scottish 4 x g.grandfather and my missing g.grandfather's mother who I think is where the Jewish ancestry comes from (and possibly the 4% Spanish), all the ancestors I've researched have come from England.

[melba_schmelba]

is 35% scottish a lot to have genetically?

It appeared with the update

Does anyone know how often these updates happen?

Is it randomly every few months or once a year?

Well, what were you before the update ? Are you aware of any obvious Scottish ancestry? I think there is an update about every year, but it may be two years!

[melba_schmelba]

Mine has totally changed and I've gone from having 1% Jewish ancestry to 3%!  It also shows 14% Scottish but as far as I know the only Scottish ancestry I have is my 4 x g.grandfather, and his ancestors which I've found as far back as his grandparents on both sides of his family.  Whether that adds up to 14% I have no idea.  It seems a lot of DNA to me, but what do I know?  Apparently, I am only 69% English and Northwestern Europe, which is a surprise as, apart from my Scottish 4 x g.grandfather and my missing g.grandfather's mother who I think is where the Jewish ancestry comes from (and possibly the 4% Spanish), all the ancestors I've researched have come from England.

If you mean great great great great grandfather, on average, that would be 1/64 of your DNA i.e 1.5%. So 14% would be surprising. But just about everyone seems to be getting a far too high level of Scottish given their traced ancestry so something has gone hokey with Ancestry's attempt to separate it from Irish and English. It does slightly make me despair as surely they have plenty of willing BETA testers they could have used before hand to see if the algorithm delivered even near accurate results. So it either seems to me they don't actually particularly care about the accuracy enough to do BETA testing, or if they do do it, they don't have either the willingness or finances from Ancestry to do extra work in fine tuning the algorithm if a BETA test programme shows it up as not being accurate.

[LizzieW]

Yes, great, great, great, great (4 x great) grandfather.  I note from another post on here that Ancestry is now saying "Because the DNA from our reference groups in Scotland and England are so similar, it’s possible that if you have English ethnicity, particularly northern England, you may now find an increased percentage of Scotland in your results and vice versa" which makes sense because many generations of my ancestors lived in Cumberland which is less than 20 miles to Gretna Green.

[melba_schmelba]

Yes, great, great, great, great (4 x great) grandfather.  I note from another post on here that Ancestry is now saying "Because the DNA from our reference groups in Scotland and England are so similar, it’s possible that if you have English ethnicity, particularly northern England, you may now find an increased percentage of Scotland in your results and vice versa" which makes sense because many generations of my ancestors lived in Cumberland which is less than 20 miles to Gretna Green.

Well, there is definitely genetic crossover between Scotland and England, mainly between the lowlands and Cumbria, Northumberland and Durham, which you can see on the map of the Genetic Landscape of Scotland study pdf, page 3
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/38/19064.full.pdf

The problem is I still do not really buy this as an excuse on Ancestry's part, as on both my parents kits, Scotland has vastly increased, but they have no ancestry from these far north counties either.