Author Topic: Were your ethnicity estimates a surprise?  (Read 6140 times)

Offline melba_schmelba

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Re: Were your ethnicity estimates a surprise?
« Reply #45 on: Thursday 14 February 19 14:52 GMT (UK) »
Thanks melba, glad its not just me with some weird MH ethnicity results.  If it wasn't for the fact that I match a few known cousins at different levels, I'd wonder if it was my sample.  The weirdest is the Scandinavian/Finnish, apart from a possible multi-x great grandfather who could be Norwegian or Danish, nothing shows.  There is known French Huguenot/Walloon and the aforementioned German 3x Great Grandfather but nothing else.  I have no known Irish, one confirmed 4x GGF from Scotland but possibly another but don't know where from (its I think a Scottish surname) and while there are some Welsh names on both sides of the family, don't know where they were from (they all appeared in London pre 1800s) but I suppose English counties bordering Wales could get reflected in the MH sample and appear as Welsh.  Who knows. :-\
I have 100% confirmed French DNA on my mother's side - lots of relatively close cousins of full or nearly full French descent, but my mother shows no French, just 100% England/Wales/NW Europe on ancestry. I think France is much less surveyed DNA wise than the UK and Ireland, as in theory commercial DNA testing there is illegal, so other than scientific/anthropological/medical DNA studies and a few French citizens that have managed to import kits without being seized by customs, the DNA companies don't have the ability to recognise it specifically. For central and northern France it is probably very similar to central and southern English DNA due to the Bretons, Normans, Huguenots, Flemish that the two populations have in common. The same probably applies for parts of north western Germany, southern Denmark and northern Netherlands whose DNA will be very similar to the English on a basic level due to the Anglo-Saxon origins there. And then the Viking input from the Danelaw and the Scottish and Irish incursions. So until they do an in-depth study in Britain, and its near continental neighbours, as Ancestry recently did with Ireland we are going to probably have this continuing confusion between British/Scandinavian/Germanic/French genes.
   One plus point I will say for MyHeritage is the ability to search matches by country. A lot of my closer matches in Germany/Holland/France are actually either ex-pats or people who clearly (from their tree) have a British parent or grandparent. I do have a lot of matches in Sweden and Norway though which is somewhat bizarre, as I have no known Scandinavian ancestry - I can only assume it comes from a small amount of Huguenot settlement that took place there (being protestant countries).