"My Origins" - ancestors likely all from the British Isles - what is "typical"?

[hurworth]

It's come back as 60% British Isles, 28% Scandinavia, 7% Asia Minor, 3% Eastern Europe and 3% Southern Europe.

Just interested to know whether that is a fairly typical "average" mix if your ancestors all lived in the British Isles in the early 1800 (which we think is the case)

[DevonCruwys]

That sounds fairly typical apart from the 7% from Asia Minor. Did you have ancestors who were in British India?

[hurworth]

That sounds fairly typical apart from the 7% from Asia Minor. Did you have ancestors who were in British India?

On the map that came with it by "Asia Minor" it had shaded an area which is approximately modern day Turkey.

We don't know of any ancestors on this line that were anywhere outside the British Isles.  They were mostly weavers, miners and shopkeepers in Yorkshire, farm labourers in Fife, or labourers from Dorset and if the info on two marriage records is correct there's a baker from Middlesex.
 

[DevonCruwys]

I've just realised what you meant. Asia Minor comes up as a subset of what FTDNA call the Middle East. If that's the case then there is no Indian connection. It's quite common for British people who've tested at FTDNA to get these small percentages of so called Middle Eastern DNA. It's related to the reference populations and labels that they use. I believe they are using Armenians to represent the Middle East and they're perhaps more European than Asian.

For an alternative reading you can upload your results to GedMatch and have a play with their admixture tools. See the blog posts linked here:

http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_tools

Don't take the admixture results too seriously. They won't correspond with your genealogical tree.

[hdw]

See the thread Ethnicity Surprises for some fellow posters puzzled by their autosomal DNA results -

http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=725451.0

As I say in my post, my results are 63% British Isles, 32% Western & Central Europe and 5% Finland & northern Siberia. A friend who is well up on such things tells me that my British Isles component is "Celtic", for want of a better word, the Western (etc.) component will be my inheritance from the Anglo-Saxons, and the odd Finland/Siberia component may refer to my paternal grandmother's Cunningham side as two direct male descendants of that extended family in my home village in Scotland tested R1a, which usually denotes Scandinavian Viking ancestry, but these two men have more DNA matches with Poles and other East Europeans than with Scandinavians. It's thought that the original R1a people came into Scandinavia and eastern Europe from the far north.

Harry

[jnu]

Hi,
I've just read through this post. My FTDNA percentage result for middle east came up as North Africa (regions Morocco and Tunisia). 

[hdw]

See the thread Ethnicity Surprises for some fellow posters puzzled by their autosomal DNA results -

http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=725451.0

As I say in my post, my results are 63% British Isles, 32% Western & Central Europe and 5% Finland & northern Siberia. A friend who is well up on such things tells me that my British Isles component is "Celtic", for want of a better word, the Western (etc.) component will be my inheritance from the Anglo-Saxons, and the odd Finland/Siberia component may refer to my paternal grandmother's Cunningham side as two direct male descendants of that extended family in my home village in Scotland tested R1a, which usually denotes Scandinavian Viking ancestry, but these two men have more DNA matches with Poles and other East Europeans than with Scandinavians. It's thought that the original R1a people came into Scandinavia and eastern Europe from the far north.

Harry

I've changed my mind about this. I think my 5% "Finland and Northern Siberia" DNA is down to my mtDNA J1c2 ancestry. So it's an inheritance from my mother's mother's (matrilineal) line. Although the female ancestor of all the J people is thought to have lived in what's now the Middle East or the Caucasus, her descendants spread all over Europe, and looking at the results of the mtDNA J project I see a lot of people with ancestry in Finland and Russia as well as the rest of northern Scandinavia.

Stephen Oppenheimer has a map in his book "The Origins of the British" in which he shows J1b (as they were then classified) people moving from Norway to Scotland in the Neolithic. That no doubt explains why I have matches with Norwegians and Norwegian-Americans as well as with people whose earliest known female ancestor was an Ulster Presbyterian of Scottish descent in Co. Antrim or Down (mine is in Belfast).

Harry

[chinka]

Hi I was wondering if anyone could help explain dna ethnicity results for me.If results are 90% Great Britain and most British people have breakdown %  of French , German & other countries.What does this mean does it mean celtic .Thanks Chinka

[hurworth]

Hi I was wondering if anyone could help explain dna ethnicity results for me.If results are 90% Great Britain and most British people have breakdown %  of French , German & other countries.What does this mean does it mean celtic .Thanks Chinka

Which company did you test with?