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.

Jumping into the gene pool...

For my birthday last year, I got a DNA test done through Ancestry.com. While I was hoping to find out that I was interesting, I turned out to be as boring as I expected: 85% British. Considering that most people in the UK can only claim about 60% Great Britain on that test (according to Ancestry), that's quite impressive... in a really boring sort of way. I must be one of the most British Canadians out there!

Anyway, I wasn't all that impressed with Ancestry's breakdown of that 85%. Really, there was none. I know I have English and Scottish ancestors (at the level of my great-grandparents, I'm 3/8 Scottish and 5/8 English... including 1/8 from Newfoundland, but as far as I can tell, that family was from England, too). Ireland came in at a measly 4%, and the percentages for the rest of my trace amounts just got lower from there. Most surprising to me was the less than 1% from Scandinavia. My Scottish ancestors were from northern Scotland. Weren't the Vikings having a great old time up there, pillaging and looting and mixing their DNA into the local populace?

Anyway, I figured I'd just have to be disappointed with Ancestry's lackluster results. And then a distant cousin told me about GEDmatch. I'm still waiting for the batch processing to be complete (at which point I'll be able to see if I have any matches with family members on the GEDmatch site), but I was still able to run my DNA info through a few tools to find out my admixture. I ended up with much more information, and a few surprises.

The Eurogenes K36 test offered some interesting bits of information (sorry it's blurry... I don't know what's going on there; the images are clear if you click on them):

All percentages above 1% are represented in the pie chart. All that's missing here is North Caucasian at 0.33% and Western Mediterranean at 0.09%. Ancestry had me at less than 1% Italian, so... I don't know what that big orange wedge is all about.

The Eurogenes EUtest V2 K15 was even more interesting:

What's really interesting is what's not shown here: Red Sea at 0.55%, Amerindian at 0.12%, Oceanian at 0.40%, and Sub-Saharan at 0.08%. Now, I know that these are very small percentages and that there are probably margins of error that could explain these results away. Amerindian showed up using some of the other analysis tools as well, though, which makes me curious about that. There's no Amerindian ancestry that I know of in my family tree... but perhaps my DNA is hinting that there's something there.

We'll see if I get any matches when the batch processing is complete...