Using ethnicity to find unknown ancestors

[brigidmac]

Case 2 is a bit like that  she knows her Irish mother

But father could be NPEand only child closest matches are at 2nd cousin and half 2nd cousin
If I'm correct Caroline Jane FULLER must have had a baby before marriage
Now have a group that don't match Fullers so think it's from Caroline's Welsh lover
Ethnicity is helping here because that's the group of people with Welsh and Germanic

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

My grandmother had children through at least 3 relationships though she was only married twice.

Hubby #1 was Irish but the two great grandchildren from that relationship vary from 3%-46% (they are full 1st cousins and share over 1000cM with each other).
Hubby #2 has Irish ancestors and the great grandchild from that side has an Irish grandfather too but is just 16% Irish.

My half sister and myself are a generation above everyone else and come from relationship #3. I've noticed a typo in my original comment as the last update is 15% for her and 40% for me, not 35 and 40 as I originally said. 

I've never been happy with the difference between myself and my half sister but I struggle more with the others. The 3% and 46% pair are just too far apart to convince me ethnicity is accurate enough to be useful. 

[brigidmac]

I think that's within the range of differences . Doesn't shock me as we all inherit little bits from different ancestors. My sister's have not tested and I don't have many exams of people who's siblings are on my radar

Pro tools have taught me that some of my unknown are in fact siblings to another of my matches

& Now I can compare 4 siblings and get ideas of the ranges .

An Indian man told me he wants to do DNA+ I agreed to help
Also will help a polish friend
And a Lithuanian who recently bought a kit

I managed kit for man whose father was Cornish+ mother African/Welsh
& Another whose father is mostly Irish and a bit Germanic & mother Welsh
The parents have no crossovers of amounts

The finds are fascinating

[Eric Hatfield]

I have a particular case I'd like to ask about please.

I want to try to identify my maternal great grandfather. My grandmother was adopted (in Melbourne, Australia), her birth mother was named on her birth documentation but her father was not.

Using the Leeds method I have been able to separate out my maternal & paternal sides and identify matches descending from my maternal grandmother and grandfather. I was able to find DNA matches that pointed to sisters of my great grandmother and so identify her. But so far no luck on finding usable matches for my great grandfather.

Like others here, I don't give much credence to ethnicity results. But feeling a bit desperate, I decided to try to use ethnicity at FTDNA, My Heritage and Ancestry to try to at least identify where he may have come from. They all have different groupings of course, but results aren't too different in my case. This is how my logic went:

1. My ethnicity is mixed between England, Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia/Northern Europe.

2. My dad's family migrated to Australia 170 years ago from eastern England, his father's family from Yorkshie where there was once a Viking population. This is roughly confirmed by my having roughly 50% from UK & Scandinavia/Western Europe.

3. If I take those percentages out of my ethnicity, the remainder is about 20-25% Scottish & 25-30% Irish (varies with each company).

4. My known maternal ancestors come from Ireland & Scotland, with the theoretical mix being:

• 31.25% Irish
• 6.25% Scottish
• 12.5% unknown (my missing great grandfather)

5. The only way to achieve something like my actual percentages (in #3 above) is for the missing great grandfather to be Scottish.

Of course the numbers don't add up neatly, but all three companies give (broadly) the same result.

My question is: has anyone else used an approach like this and later (when they had identified their ancestor) found the calculation gave a reasonable result (or didn't)?

Thanks.

[Biggles50]

Eric.

In answer to your question, sort of.

For me Ancestry’s ethnicity is getting more accurate with each iteration.

I could not resolve why there was only a smattering of Welsh and a large Irish percentage.

Nor how Italian went from nothing to 1/4.

Then DNA matches started to show and over the years they built up.

What these showed was that were one or more NPE’s in my family, initially what
I did not expect was that they were so close.

Now with the latest split in the Ancestry target populations I can see where my Irish ancestors were from and which lines are from each of these areas.  This in turn sort of supports what documented evidence there is.

Various family members travelled from all over Ireland to Manchester and Bradford, there they married other Irish immigrants and this helped tremendously as English records are vastly superior to what there is in the Emerald Isle.

Strangely on my Italian side different families travelled to England and settled in Bradford but they all originated from a 20 mile radius area south east of Rome, they too initially married others of Italian origin and the Ancestry region gives their region correctly all be it it is the whole of southern mainland Italy.

[Zaphod99]

Eric, but what exactly do you mean by saying that your grandfather is probably Scottish? He's probably got bits of Scandinavian, northwest Europe and Irish.

I'm really starting to believe that we should not bother for another five years. They might have it sorted out by then.

Zaph

[Eric Hatfield]

Eric, but what exactly do you mean by saying that your grandfather is probably Scottish? He's probably got bits of Scandinavian, northwest Europe and Irish.

In doing that analysis, I ignored small percentages (3% or below), and of course I accepted that the numbers wouldn't totally add up. So I agree that he probably had small percentages of other ethnicities. But I'm deducing (whether rightly or not) that his major ethnicity was Scottish.

[Eric Hatfield]

In answer to your question, sort of.
For me Ancestry’s ethnicity is getting more accurate with each iteration.

Thanks for the interesting reflections. I guess "sort of" is some sort of endorsement of the approach.

And I agree that Ancestry's latest ethnicity calculations are impressive.

[4b2]

The only thing I've found ethnicity specifically useful for is when a match appears to have no link in their tree. I often check the ethnicity of the match, particularly for US trees. Sometimes you will find the tree has no correspondence to the ethnicity. In these cases you will often find the spouse of the linked/home person is the actual match.