Ancestry DNA a little confused and could do with some advice.

[S128]

Hello,

Recently my Mother had her Ancestry DNA results back and I am struggling explaining them to her so I wonder if any of you kind people could help me out.

On my Mothers side we can pretty much trace all of her family back to the 1600's all be it one line where it seems to fizzle out in the late 1700's.

She was confused and so am I as to how she got such a high estimate for Europe west and such a low estimate for Great Britain. 

Does the high estimate for Europe West mean she has recent DNA from Western Europe?

Seeing as Great Britain is in Western Europe is it difficult to differentiate between the two? if so why is there a Great Britain Category etc etc.

Why does she have such a high estimate for Western Europe if her tree says she wouldn't ?

Her results were as follows ;

Ethnicity Estimate
 Europe West 72%
 Great Britain 18%
 Southern England

 Low Confidence Regions
 Ireland/Scotland/Wales 5%
 Europe South 2%
 Scandinavia 2%
 Caucasus 1%

I do hope this makes sense and I hope someone could possibly enlighten me as to why?

Many Thanks

[davidft]

This is my personal opinion (but one shared by many people if you read back the threads on this subject)

Ancestry's DNA test (and other companies tests) do not tell you your ethnic ancestry. What they do is compare your results with their sample populations. There are two problems with this in that some of the sample populations are very small (in single digits) and how do they know they represent the ethnicities they claim there is just not the proof for it. Also different companies have different sample populations so testing the same DNA at different companies can give quite different results. Perhaps as a way of seeing this happen you could upload the results to Gedmatch.com which has several different analysis tools and see the different results you get.

Also from time to time the companies reclassify what the ethnicities are and so you can suddenly go from being 33% Scandinavian to 16% Scandinavian as happened in my case. How does that happen if their results are reliable?

No in truth the tests are just a bit of fun, they are not robust and are subject to change as intrepretations are reclassified and the "science" improves.

Oh and one last thing, the Ancestry website has lots of pages dedicated to DNA including one entitled "Unexpected Ethnicity results" were they no use to you?

[S128]

This is my personal opinion (but one shared by many people if you read back the threads on this subject)

Ancestry's DNA test (and other companies tests) do not tell you your ethnic ancestry. What they do is compare your results with their sample populations. There are two problems with this in that some of the sample populations are very small (in single digits) and how do they know they represent the ethnicities they claim there is just not the proof for it. Also different companies have different sample populations so testing the same DNA at different companies can give quite different results. Perhaps as a way of seeing this happen you could upload the results to Gedmatch.com which has several different analysis tools and see the different results you get.

Also from time to time the companies reclassify what the ethnicities are and so you can suddenly go from being 33% Scandinavian to 16% Scandinavian as happened in my case. How does that happen if their results are reliable?

No in truth the tests are just a bit of fun, they are not robust and are subject to change as intrepretations are reclassified and the "science" improves.

Oh and one last thing, the Ancestry website has lots of pages dedicated to DNA including one entitled "Unexpected Ethnicity results" were they no use to you?

Thank you very much for the reply. I think we were a little confused as my Mothers Great grandmother has been a difficult one to find any information on and we are still not sure if the lady who we think she was is her.

We thought maybe there was some sort of link to the higher percentage of Western Europe as to why we can find so little information on her but from reading it seems the ethnicity calculations are a bit of a sham?

I did read the ancestry explanation but I had more specific questions that I wanted to ask so thought I would ask here.

Thanks again for the help.

[davidft]

Thank you very much for the reply. I think we were a little confused as my Mothers Great grandmother has been a difficult one to find any information on and we are still not sure if the lady who we think she was is her.

We thought maybe there was some sort of link to the higher percentage of Western Europe as to why we can find so little information on her but from reading it seems the ethnicity calculations are a bit of a sham?

Thanks again for the help.

In short yes they are. However the results can be useful in matching to other individuals and by comparing trees and research notes you may find something that helps. And in truth that is the true purpose of the autosomal tests, its just Ancestry flog it on the ethnicity tests as they know people will go for that even if they are of little value. I mentioned gedmatch above, another advantage of downloading the results to there is it will compare your results to those of others there including people who tested with other companies and so you may find some new matches. That said if you do not intend to follow up the matches then maybe that's not worth doing.

[brigidmac]

I dont believe they are a scam

i would say some likelihood of  West Europeasn input
do they break it down  if you click on the button



we had ancestry tests and they DO tell us ethnicity

tho they have recently changed definition of English and Irish


my mums DNA had 22% eastern european jewish
that would have come as a surprise

but we knew grandma was adopted and had already traced the birth father who was indeed Russian Jewish


i have 14% of his blood in my veins which is a good reflection of average Great grandparent %

but I dont know where our scandinavian blood comes from mum has 9% I have 8% and my scottish aunt has 7%

I read that most English people have about 33% English DNA cos we all have a lot of welsh irish Scots scandinavian and other traces

S128
does she have any siblings cousins or children who have taken the test
have you looked at the shared matches function ..

.does she have 2nd or 3rd cousin matches of people with no common names on their trees

do a search by location and maybe you will find a european who lived in same town as grandparents
or parents ....but be prepared for the conclusion ?

also if she has 2nd or first cousins whose DNA tests dont match at all you can work out by elimimation

for example my mums 1st cousins matched as !st cousins
 but those descended from her parents half-siblings came out as 2nd cousins her fathers parents had both been married before
her mothers mother had a son when she got married after first baby was adopted

If there is adoption in the family a person  may not know they were adopted

[brigidmac]

West european i meant

[davidft]

I dont believe they are a scam

i would say some likelihood of  West Europeasn input
do they break it down  if you click on the button

we had ancestry tests and they DO tell us ethnicity

Re the parts in Italics.

When even Bryan Sykes of Oxford Ancestors is against you, you know you have an uphill struggle

https://www.oxfordancestors.com/

for example " DNA tests are widely available, even if their meaning is sometimes dubious. The popularity of ‘ethnic testing’ is a case in point, where even religious persuasion is given a genetic foundation by some companies. Have they never heard of the outrages of ‘racial purity’ and the eugenics movement or is it just one more business opportunity?"

Still if you are happy with what you have got then the testing companies will be smiling all the way to the bank. 

[Eric Hatfield]

Hi S128,

You will find many different opinions on this, so I might as well add mine. I find myself somewhere between the negative views of davidft and the positive views of brigidmac.

I agree with David that Ancestry oversells the value of the ethnicity testing, but I still think it tells us something interesting and sometimes useful. The areas are a little arbitrary and overlapping, but that is because populations (and DNA) vary gradually, and do not exist in tight well-defined blocs. The reference populations may be small or arbitrary in some cases, but that are still useful information. The percentages do keep varying, so we shouldn't set too much store on the exact numbers, but they still give us a general picture.

I think one of the difficulties is timeframe. If, as is often the case, our ancestors moved around a bit - whether a long time ago or more recently due to war and persecution - then we may have near ancestors in UK, older ancestors in Germany and ancient ancestors in an arc across Europe from Turkey to Scandinavia (as is my case, revealed through mtDNA testing). The autosomal test will reveal relatively recent ancestry, but that may still be varied if we go back more than a few generations.

The reference populations will include this sort of variation, hence the fuzziness of the areas and estimates, and the differences between the different companies. I have ethnicity estimates from Ancestry, FTDNA and Gedmatch (which has many different estimates) and they are all different, but there is a reasonable commonality too. I haven't yet found ethnicity useful in developing my family tree, but I don't think it will always be irrelevant, especially as more and more people test and reference populations get larger and better defined.

[brigidmac]

I agree

Ps the idea of classifying by religion does sound ridiculous but because various jewish populations were persecuted and expelled from one country to another and made to live in restricted areas they do actually have an ethnicity.
It has been useful for me because I only have 1 Europeanjewish gfather so matches with a high jewish
Ethnicity will be via him

Also on the Scottish side ..there seems to be a division of British Scottish  and Celtic Scottish .my paternal grandparents and there ancestors were from. The Glasgow area at least as far back as 1800 ...im linking their relatives thru names but also when I find matches to other people
I try locality matches to see if any mutual towns come up ....i dont know surnames of my cousins grandchildren and they may not know their grandmothers maiden name so going by name alone not always obvious.

Ps im not disagree with eminent scientists  it's the way different companies define their parameters.
I know Turi King    who helped discover King richard.s dna.
And i live in leicester where dna was first develloped and used to convict a rapist