Odd Connacht Ireland result from Ancestry DNA

[alan o]

Thanks.  There is also a very spurious North German 1% that I am ignoring completely......

[coombs]

I would have wondered if there was an unknown NPE in the Mathry ancestry in the early 1800s or maybe 1700s, and it was an Irish sailor etc, but that is just supposition, and as others suggest, take these low percentages with a dollop of salt.

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

I have 1% Wales and zero evidence of any Welsh blood in my family for over 225 years.

Do take low %ages with a bottle of Saxa.

It was always a large bag you used to mention, are you unwell or just economising?

[Biggles50]

I have 1% Wales and zero evidence of any Welsh blood in my family for over 225 years.

Do take low %ages with a bottle of Saxa.

It was always a large bag you used to mention, are you unwell or just economising?

I used to order 50kg bags of salt but thought that it was a bit overkill in this instance to mention it.

[alan o]

My 2% is on my maternal side.  My cousin (father's nephew) has a 1% connection.  Odd coincidence as he is 99% welsh with this spurious 1 %.  As my 'irishness' is maternal and his is paternal it is all very odd.

[David Nicoll]

Hi,
    I have a similar Connacht result, small on both sides if you believe Ancestry. This is where I get frustrated with Ancestry, they don’t want to share the details. Given that the latest update seems to have pushed all our groups back in time, I am wondering if we are seeing early or pre-Christian relationships here. Given that apparently Connacht is a distinctly stable DNA pool, are we seeing evidence of the Sea Road up the west coast.There are historic Early Irish Welsh connections and certainly ones to the Western Isles which might explain this anomaly, I guess we will just have to wait and hope for a bit of clarity.

[alan o]

What also surprised me was a complete lack of any Dorset ancestary.  My maternal grandfather's family all came from the Isle of Portland going back to the 1680s and earlier.  There were 1000 people on the Isle in the 1830s and as far as I can see they rarely married anyone from outside of the island.  I wonder if the gene pool was so restricted it does not figure on Ancestry's norms for the rest of Dorset.

My mother's DNA does not have Dorset either but an attribution to SE England for which there are no identifiable ancestors at all.

[David Nicoll]

I think this is probably likely, perhaps the isolation goes back a very long way.
I do think that generally Ancestry is reporting real information, just hard to understand sometimes.
From what I understand there is a very clear demarcation along the line of the Danelaw boundary, so separation runs deep.

[alan o]

The early marriage records on Portland go back to early 1700s and it is the same few surnames that pop up again and again. 

I spoke to a Local Historian who related that as late as the 1980s he met an old man on Portland who had never crossed the causeway to the mainland in his life!