Ancestry DNA update

[Biggles50]

Update happened to my Wife and my results.

Town & Country 22%

Early Connecticut and New York Settlers ??  6% WTF and who cares.

Immediate thoughts, Tech Staff who wrote the algorithms must have been on a heck of a bender for a few weeks.

Above is what I had yesterday after the update, today the two spurious results that I quoted have vanished and the results are very similar to what they were pre update.

[Rena]

Mine is now utter nonsense

I have loads of english ancestors and have dropped from 15% to 3% England and Northwest Europe

7% Germanic Europe is new.  Scotland 14% remains the same. Welsh 6% increase.

Hard luck in having to sort out this new information.

Have you ever noticed that many towns have a place that has the name "Brunswick" (Brunswick Square, Brunswick Place, Brunswick House, etc)

Brunswick is a place in Germany.  King James VI of Scotland who was also King James 1 of England (1566 - 1625) gave the hand of his granddaughter Sophia in marriage to a German Duke and in exchange the King wanted (and got) a dowry of a piece of mainland Europe, which was named "Kingdom of Hanover"  which was ruled by a British King.   We had many wars with France and quite often it was caused by France stepping on the toes of the Hanover Kingdom.   The people of the Hanover Kingdom had English customs and considered themselves English.  (according to my school teacher - and then I discovered I had a German Hanoverian ancestor named Sophia).

If you look in old Trade Directories you'll see that larger British towns actually had foreign Consulates/Embassies in them looking after trade and their own citizens .

The Germanic Hessian Army had barracks in southern England and when demobbed soldiers (especially officers) would head towards London or elsewhere to find work.  Thus it's quite possible that there was a marriage.  We have an English politician with an old Germanic surname = Harriet HARMAN.  The meaning and origin of the surname is:-   "The distinguished surname Harman is of very ancient German origin. It is derived from a Germanic personal name made up of the elements "heri," meaning "army," and "man," meaning "man."

[glamwales]

Tiverton - Devon - Axhorns?
High Littleton - Somerset - Smith?
Dursley - Glouc (at least 200 years) - Hancock, Berry, Cross, Woodward
Bradford - Egan

I think i will wait for the next update !

[TonyV]

I didn't get the nonsense ones above and the vast majority of my latest ethnicity estimate remains very similar to the last estimate and is pretty believable. That's not too surprising given that the areas I relate to are not ones that have been changed by Ancestry this time around. The only thing that has been added is that my Irish ancestry now includes some from the settlers in the eastern US states which I don't think were there last time round (the results I mean, not the settlers).

There is however an oddity. I have a significant but minority Scottish component (which is not surprising given the part that Scottish settlers played in Irish history and the inevitable inter-marriages that would have followed). However in the ethnicity breakdown between parents the Scottish ethnicity is mainly attributed to my maternal side and only a small percentage to my paternal side which is where 100% of my Irish ethnicity comes from. I have traced my maternal side well beyond the 5 or so generations that autosomal testing is said to be reliable for and I am pretty sure that I have no maternal Scottish DNA in me from that period. In fact there were no maternal kilts around for at least 300 years and none likely to be from the villages in the East Midlands where my maternal lines come from.

Tony

 

[Josephine]

Why does it say "Jewish Peoples of Europe" now? Didn't it used to say Ashkenazi Jewish, which is the correct term?

[Lanc81]

There's still not a definite ethnicity for sephardic yet .....

[Josephine]

There's still not a definite ethnicity for sephardic yet .....

I wonder if perhaps it's not the preferred DNA site for Jewish ancestry? (I don't actually know.)

[pughcd]

Hi @Gadget

I can confirm that both Norway and the joint Sweden & Denmark are still Ancestry ethnicities in the August 2022 update. I am 6% Norway and my wife is 4% Sweden & Denmark.

pughcd

[Gadget]

Hi pughed

Thanks for confirming.

This time,  Ancestry seem to have allocated  Sweden and Denmark to add to my list of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Norway.

I've noticed that my latest (low) matches all seem to have S and D as part of their profiles too. I think the powers that be at Ancestry are having a little fun.

I'm taking it all with a pinch of salt 

Gadget

add - I assume that they've been working on the  characteristics of  their Scandinavian categories. My interest is in their  ethnicity model  per se  rather than what they make of my ancestral heritage.