RootsChat.Com

Thanks Craclyn - glad I'd understood that correctly! I have no male relatives at all - my father's generation have all died  and I have no brothers, cousins, even second cousins  - there are only females in my generation. So I'm grateful to the autosomal test, as being my only way into my paternal line. If my sisters could provide me with more clues, I need to persuade them to be tested!

My very un-science-minded brain is fried after several hours trying to understand the principles behind the Ancestry DNA test and its implications for my family history, not to mention uploading the data onto FTDNA  and GEDmatch.

One thing I'm still not clear about: would it be worth my sisters also getting the autosomal test? I'm not sure I've understood correctly, but am I right in thinking that a sibling's DNA might turn up other matches?

I've just received my results and am fairly bemused  at the moment. They are:

Irish:39%
Western Europe:35%
Great Britain:22%
Iberian Peninsula:2%
European Jewish:1%
Italy/Greece:<1%
One of my paternal grandparents was  Irish, and there's a bit of Irish on my mother's side, but most of the lines for the other 3 grandparents are English. I'm guessing that the Western European may be explained by the fact that quite a lot of my mother's family came from Suffolk and south Lincolnshire  - Anglo Saxon influence? But how far back are these tests looking? eg could Iberian Peninsula be early  migration into Ireland, or much later shipwrecked Armada ships? (My Dad always reckoned that was the explanation of his very dark colouring!). Is Great Britain indicative of pre-Roman, pre-Anglo Saxon ancestry?
The matches I've looked at so far are disappointing: I can find no obvious links as far as surname or area are concerned, even though I've got my lines fairly complete to 4 or 5 generations.
A distant Canadian cousin (we think) did the test at the same time. We met through Ancestry, have the same surname and our families come from the same part of Northern Ireland. She's done the work on the Irish side of the family, but hasn't been able to definitely prove the link between us because of the gaps in the Irish records. Her test result is totally different, with only 10% Irish and an above-average Great Britain score, which seems bizarre, given that she knows for sure that her family is Irish. Might it indicate Scottish emigration to Ireland? (though the surname is  Irish, not Scots).
The test has posed far more questions than its answered, but nevertheless it's fascinating. I've wanted to do this for years, but have had to wait for the cost to come down.

Thankyou very much - no hurry. I'd rather put that family to one side after all my struggles with them! But it would be interesting to try...

Another one from my family - there's the rather odd name Saycell. I wondered, and someone else later confirmed, that this was originally Cecil. Illiterate people were presumably completely reliant on enumerators, clergymen and other officials to write their names down correctly, and given that local accents were much stronger and diverse than now, and said officials came from a different class and probably often locality, it's not surprising that spellings and even the actual name often got changed.