Background: My family tree consists mostly of individuals who have been in the United States since the 1700s. All lines as far as I have been able to ascertain them within six generations are either from Germany or the British Isles/Ireland. The only more recent exceptions to this timeline are (1) the grandparents of my maternal grandmother (born 1909) who immigrated to Indiana from Germany in the 1840s; and (2) my own maternal grandmother, who came to the United States from Germany in the 1960s having married an American. Nearly all of my German ancestry comes from the region between Stuttgart and Frankfurt (Westphalia, Rhineland, Hessen).
Why, then, do I have a cumulative 13% of my Ancestry.com DNA results from Southern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula? I understand the mixture of peoples and populations that occurred in Europe; does that explain this? Could that mean that one of my more recent 20th century German ancestors, for example, had more recent Iberian/Greek/Italian ancestry themselves?
PS - MyHeritage shows me at 100% Northern and Western Europe only, though I transferred my raw DNA from Ancestry there rather than taking their own test. Is this significant?
