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General => Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing => Topic started by: Biggles50 on Tuesday 02 August 22 11:24 BST (UK)
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I had a splash banner show up this morning advising that a DNA update was coming soon.
8 new ethnicity regions.
The mind boggles at what there could possibly be different from the many permutations that there have been since we had our DNA tested.
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I've now got an ethnicity inheritance as a chromosome browser.
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How strange. They must be rollingout updates in batches as my ethnicity estimate hasn't been changed since the update earlier in the year and the so called ''ethnicity chromosome browser'' arrived for me a few weeks ago.
I've noticed that the chromosome browser seems to be being introduced in batches but the ethnicity estimates all came together. was rolled out at the same time.
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I had a splash banner show up this morning advising that a DNA update was coming soon.
8 new ethnicity regions.
The mind boggles at what there could possibly be different from the many permutations that there have been since we had our DNA tested.
This appeared on my Ancestry account too. I'll be interested to see what, if any, changes there will be to my ethnicity. This might be why I've had no new DNA matches for nearly a week.
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I've just been in and seen about the 8 new ethniciities. I wonder what I'll be allocated now ;D
Phew - I had a shock and thought that my ethnicity had totally change - no Welsh or Scottish but various continental European countries.
I then realised that I was looking at the results of one of those I have access to. I'm still Welsh/Scottish/Irish :-X :-X :-X
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Hopefully might get some Norwegian back now :)
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When I went in this evening, I found that quite a few new matches - even a 33cM one! Perhaps they've finished their ethnicity work and are getting back to the day to day processing!
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Same here, 18 new ones this morning, after nothing for nearly a week
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Has anyone had the update yet? :-\
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I haven't had it yet. Hope I don't lose my 2% Norwegian...had it when I first did the DNA test, then it vanished for a few years but returned with the last update.
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Ethnicity update will happen on the 17th August....
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Ethnicity update will happen on the 17th August....
Can't wait ;D
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Would like to see at least some of my 50% Italian ancestry appearing.
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Is it April 1st??
My Update shows my Parent split results as;
36% Growth of Aguascalientes
17% England and NW Europe
15 % Khoisan, Aka & Mbuti people
10% Eastern Europe & Russia
7% Early Connecticut & New York
Settlers
6 % Class Conflict & the Social Gospel
1% Town & Country
What??
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Update happened to my Wife and my results.
Town & Country 22% ?????????
Early Connecticut and New York Settlers ????? 6% WTF and who cares.
Immediate thoughts, Tech Staff who wrote the algorithms must have been on a heck of a bender for a few weeks.
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Oh my wife is 16% Nativism & Regulation 17
Have they been hacked?
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Immediate thoughts, Tech Staff who wrote the algorithms must have been on a heck of a bender for a few weeks.
;D
They've found some Sweden and Denmark for me now ::) ::) ::)
and I've still got those Ohio Settlers .
Add - To think that many of those who test on Ancestry do the test to find out their about ethnic origins !!
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There do seem to be some gremlins in the system.
When I go to my account profile page it is saying 20% Ostroleka County and Surrounds and then it will say Scotland when you go into it. Then going on the DNA profile page for the ethnicity estimate it will say 20% Scotland. The 2% Irish on the profile page is just grey and doesn't say anything until you click on it.
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I think you are right about gremlins in the system, Nova67. The gremlins do however seem to have been sorted overnight and so it is worth looking at the results again.
When I looked at the beta inheritance for my parents last night it had a breakdown using the terms such as Early Connecticut and New York Settlers and Class Conflict and the Social Gospel. However this morning the breakdown has reverted to Scotland, England and Northwest Europe and Norway.
William
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I've gone from 1% Norwegian to 6% each Sweden and Denmark, and Germanic Europe all off my English %!. My wife's has gone from 3% Norway to12% Sweden and Denmark.
Both of us has exclusively English ancestry on all lines as far back as I have managed to trace
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My Scottish Ancestry from who knows where has turned Irish but only half of it, my Swedish Danish bit has disappeared and I need a straightforward explanation of the chromosome painter. I wish they colours were a little more distinctive too.
Previous estimate
England & Northwestern Europe 70% now 77%
Scotland 21% now 10% Irish
Norway 4% now 9%
Sweden & Denmark 3% gone
Wales 2% now 4%
Confused.
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Was there a Sweden and Denmark Category before this update?
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Yes, there was but mine has disappeared. Have modified my post to show the changes. Looking at it maybe Norway now covers Sweden and Denmark as well? Not sure the Swedes and Danish would approve! :-)
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Mine is now utter nonsense
I have loads of english ancestors and have dropped from 15% to 3% England and Northwest Europe
7% Germanic Europe is new. Scotland 14% remains the same. Welsh 6% increase.
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My tree is exclusively welsh and england back to 1700's. Something is very wrong with this update. Be interesting to see if anyone else had lost their english mix to the germans :)
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Yes, Sweden and Denmark existed prior to this update, mine increased by 2% this time.
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Mine changed slightly...Irish 90%, Scottish 4% (down from 8%), got my England & North West Europe back (it vanished In a previous update), now 4% and still have the 2% Norwegian.
Is it April 1st??
My Update shows my Parent split results as;
36% Growth of Aguascalientes
17% England and NW Europe
15 % Khoisan, Aka & Mbuti people
10% Eastern Europe & Russia
7% Early Connecticut & New York
Settlers
6 % Class Conflict & the Social Gospel
1% Town & Country
What??
pughcd, that is hilarious! ;D ;D ;D ;D
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Update happened to my Wife and my results.
Town & Country 22% ?????????
Early Connecticut and New York Settlers ????? 6% WTF and who cares.
Immediate thoughts, Tech Staff who wrote the algorithms must have been on a heck of a bender for a few weeks.
Above is what I had yesterday after the update, today the two spurious results that I quoted have vanished and the results are very similar to what they were pre update.
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Mine is now utter nonsense
I have loads of english ancestors and have dropped from 15% to 3% England and Northwest Europe
7% Germanic Europe is new. Scotland 14% remains the same. Welsh 6% increase.
Hard luck in having to sort out this new information.
Have you ever noticed that many towns have a place that has the name "Brunswick" (Brunswick Square, Brunswick Place, Brunswick House, etc)
Brunswick is a place in Germany. King James VI of Scotland who was also King James 1 of England (1566 - 1625) gave the hand of his granddaughter Sophia in marriage to a German Duke and in exchange the King wanted (and got) a dowry of a piece of mainland Europe, which was named "Kingdom of Hanover" which was ruled by a British King. We had many wars with France and quite often it was caused by France stepping on the toes of the Hanover Kingdom. The people of the Hanover Kingdom had English customs and considered themselves English. (according to my school teacher - and then I discovered I had a German Hanoverian ancestor named Sophia).
If you look in old Trade Directories you'll see that larger British towns actually had foreign Consulates/Embassies in them looking after trade and their own citizens .
The Germanic Hessian Army had barracks in southern England and when demobbed soldiers (especially officers) would head towards London or elsewhere to find work. Thus it's quite possible that there was a marriage. We have an English politician with an old Germanic surname = Harriet HARMAN. The meaning and origin of the surname is:- "The distinguished surname Harman is of very ancient German origin. It is derived from a Germanic personal name made up of the elements "heri," meaning "army," and "man," meaning "man."
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Tiverton - Devon - Axhorns?
High Littleton - Somerset - Smith?
Dursley - Glouc (at least 200 years) - Hancock, Berry, Cross, Woodward
Bradford - Egan
I think i will wait for the next update !
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I didn't get the nonsense ones above and the vast majority of my latest ethnicity estimate remains very similar to the last estimate and is pretty believable. That's not too surprising given that the areas I relate to are not ones that have been changed by Ancestry this time around. The only thing that has been added is that my Irish ancestry now includes some from the settlers in the eastern US states which I don't think were there last time round (the results I mean, not the settlers).
There is however an oddity. I have a significant but minority Scottish component (which is not surprising given the part that Scottish settlers played in Irish history and the inevitable inter-marriages that would have followed). However in the ethnicity breakdown between parents the Scottish ethnicity is mainly attributed to my maternal side and only a small percentage to my paternal side which is where 100% of my Irish ethnicity comes from. I have traced my maternal side well beyond the 5 or so generations that autosomal testing is said to be reliable for and I am pretty sure that I have no maternal Scottish DNA in me from that period. In fact there were no maternal kilts around for at least 300 years and none likely to be from the villages in the East Midlands where my maternal lines come from.
Tony
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Why does it say "Jewish Peoples of Europe" now? Didn't it used to say Ashkenazi Jewish, which is the correct term?
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There's still not a definite ethnicity for sephardic yet .....
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There's still not a definite ethnicity for sephardic yet .....
I wonder if perhaps it's not the preferred DNA site for Jewish ancestry? (I don't actually know.)
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Hi @Gadget
I can confirm that both Norway and the joint Sweden & Denmark are still Ancestry ethnicities in the August 2022 update. I am 6% Norway and my wife is 4% Sweden & Denmark.
pughcd
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Hi pughed
Thanks for confirming.
This time, Ancestry seem to have allocated Sweden and Denmark to add to my list of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Norway.
I've noticed that my latest (low) matches all seem to have S and D as part of their profiles too. I think the powers that be at Ancestry are having a little fun.
I'm taking it all with a pinch of salt ;D
Gadget
add - I assume that they've been working on the characteristics of their Scandinavian categories. My interest is in their ethnicity model per se rather than what they make of my ancestral heritage.
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Hi Gadget,
Yes it's always interesting to see the latest tweaks. I am fortunate in having four grandparents with very different backgrounds. Consequently I only have 96 4th Cousins or closer. It's certainly worth checking out your matches ethnicities. One could easily put this data into a spreadsheet.
Thanks for the suggestion!
pughcd
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Hi
I got my Ancestry update today. No change for me and to be honest I find my percentages a bit dubious.
Wales 97%
England & NorthWestern Europe 3%
I know my ancestors did not move around a lot but 97% seems a bit much, nobody can be that "pure" ;D
When I first did the test a few years ago I had percentages of Ireland and Scotland in my breakdown but they have all vanished a couple of updates ago.
I did a DNA test with FamilyTreeDNA some years ago, they give me a different breakdown.
England/Wales/Scotland 53%
Ireland 44%
Italian Peninsula <2%
Magyar <1%
Baltic<1%
I am guessing they interpret the results in a different way. Don't know which to believe....any ideas?
Cheers
100%Gog
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Hi Gog
Ancestry has the largest reference group for their DNA estimates. However, as you say, your Welsh estimate is rather large. What you should really be looking at is the range, as the estimate is just that- an estimate.
What you need to do is to click on the figure in the table and another popup will appear with the range. This is what they have calculated for my Welshness ;D
Gadget
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Hi Gadget,
Just did what you said and it came up with a 91-100% range!
When I first did my tests I was expecting some southern European in the mix because as a family we have a bit of a latin look about us. So surprised to get such high Welsh numbers.
100%Gog
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Your interests (below your messages), look very Welsh to me ;D
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My new Ancestry results are as follows; 61% Irish, 27% English, 6% Welsh, 6% Swedish/Danish.
Looking at my papertrail and going by my 64 4xgt grandparents (some are estimated because I haven't got back that far), I have 55% Irish, 28% English, 5% Welsh, 6% Scottish and 6% Unknown. Interestingly, and I may be reading too much into this, my Unknowns were named Anderson and just remotely possible that they came from Sweden or Denmark.
Anyway, even ignoring the smaller percentages, I'm quite impressed by how accurate my "ethnicity" breakdown seems to be.
I am a bit suspicious though that all my chromosomes (apart from chromosome 6) are all pure English, Irish, Welsh etc. So for example, my chromosome 1 contribution from my mother is entirely Irish while the same chromosome contribution from my father is all English. On the other hand, my chromosome 6 contribution from my mother is about 80% English and 20% Irish while my chromosome 6 contribution from my father is about 90% Swedish/Danish and 10% Irish. Even the Welsh contributions are wholly concentrated on just three chromosomes, yet my Welsh ancestors were born in 1700's - plenty of time for the chromosomes to get fragmented. Perhaps I just don't understand how it works :-\
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Alpine, I don't understand how it works either, I keep being sent information which I know is not my family tree, my Gt grandfather as an instance is totally wrong, half of me is sorry I even did a DNA test, nothing new to what I had already found under my own steam
Louisa Maud.
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My latest ethnicity estimates give me a few percent Irish, which is odd because my paper trail gives me no Irish ancestors at all. But looking at Ancestry's explanation - Irish not only covers parts of Western Scotland (which I knew about) but it covers the Channel Islands and Brittany ??? I have one branch from Jersey, so that might explain the "Irish".
Personally, I don't waste time getting hung up on the ethnicity estimate, probably because it is otherwise pretty accurate for me and even more so for OH, who has both sides coming from a small area of East Anglia. However it did confirm a family suspicion that my 2nd cousin once removed was the child of my 2nd cousin and an undisclosed Polish serviceman and not, as his birth cert stated, the child of the 2nd cousin's parents (who were actually his grandparents.)
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My latest results 15% Welsh down from 16% on mum's side (grandfather from N Wales), I match on chromosome 3 and 18 with 4 or 5 people in the Gedmatch Wales group. 7% Sweden Denmark which is on Dad's Yorkshire or Westmorland side, I'm guessing ancient DNA (0-10%). England & Northwestern Europe 68% Scotland 8% Irish 2%. Broadly the same.
Simon
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I would not get hung up on the Ethnicity ESTIMATES the main aspect of your DNA test is to find physical relationships.
Mine bears some relationship to my tree, but many elements simply do not tally with what research shows in 250 years of identified family ancestry.
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Ethnicity estimates are intended to infer your ethnic origins at least 500 years ago, or even longer. So comparing them to what is known about an individual's ancestry from documentary research is unlikely to cover that period. Could that be a get-out clause for Ancestry in the event that an individual's ethnicity prediction is not what they expect? I don't know, but I often see people posting that, "My grandfather was from Ireland" or similar. Far too recent to infer anything in relation to the ethnicity estimates.
The methodology is based on reference populations. Ancestry are considered to have the best coverage, but the information they have online is illuminating. Reference populations average about 800 people per group, although obviously some will be higher and some lower. The reference population for Ireland is 794 individuals. For England and North Western Europe combined it is 1,907. I haven't bothered working that out as a percentage of the population of each of those regions, but it will be insignificant. The white paper describing their ethnicity estimation is full of references to "estimates", "inferences", "assumptions" and "probabilities". Prediction accuracy for a single-origin individual is estimated (that word again) to vary between 27 and 100 percent depending on the assigned region. Yes, you read that right - 27 percent. For people with multi-region estimates, the predicted results vary even further. Someone with four grandparents all originating from the same country is likely to have a far more accurate prediction than an individual whose grandparents originate from four different regions. For a person attributed with some English and North Western European ethnicity combined with one or more additional regions, their percentage of ethnicity for England and North Western Europe as stated in the estimate could vary by up to about 50 percent from the stated percentage, according to the white paper.
The ethnicity estimate you are given is a prediction of probabilities, not a statement of fact. It is informative and maybe educational to an extent, but with the caveat that there is no guarantee of reliability.
It likely sells DNA tests to the average punter, but for family history research the process of segment matching to identify family relationships is much more useful and reliable.