Sunday, December 8, 2019

DN... Eh?

It's been a while since I posted!

Ancestry has changed up its Ethnicity Estimates, so now I'm:

75% England, Wales & Northwestern Europe
9% Ireland & Scotland
8% Germanic Europe
7% Norway
1% European Jewish

So... still pretty British. Out of curiosity, though, I input my raw data into MyHeritage... and came up with some wildly different results:

62.2% Irish, Scottish, and Welsh
24.2% Scandinavian
13.6% Greek and South Italian

So... not so British after all. 0% English! I guess nobody told my London-born great-grandmother. Or the myriad Newfoundland ancestors, most of whom came from southern England...

It's hard to know who to believe. While I don't have a problem with Ancestry's 75% England, Wales & Northwestern Europe number, I'm still trying to figure out where the 8% Germanic Europe and 7% Norway genes are coming from; those are pretty sizeable chunks, but they must be combined from little snippets here and there because I can go back to the 1700s on pretty much every branch of my tree, and everybody's from England, Scotland, or Ireland.

MyHeritage's 13.6% Greek and South Italian is interesting, though. It didn't show up on Ancestry's estimate, so I'm not sure how accurate it is... but I did have an ancestor who was born in Corfu when her father was stationed there with his whole family. Makes me wonder if perhaps something happened. The sort of thing families like to cover up...

I'm still 100% European, though, by both companies' estimates. Darn. I was kind of hoping for some long-lost ancestor who came from someplace else.