How Welsh am I?

[coombs]

Pity that you discount taking a DNA test purely on cost grounds.

Anyone can have all the paper records galore for their tree but they can mean nothing if they are not confirmed by DNA.

Looking at my own DNA matches there are two gaping holes, there are none from my Paternal Great Grandfathers and beyond and yet I have over one hundred DNA matches who share with various other matches in a standalone tree of 700 the same Irish connection. 

My paper records for each in my own tree are robust but there is a probable NPE.

IMO taking a DNA test is a Must Do action for all Genealogists researching their family.

My ancestors came from various parts of the UK, from Oxfordshire to London and from Co Durham to Dorset. I have some French Huguenot ancestors, a bit of Scottish and some very distant Italian, Welsh and Irish thanks to a gateway ancestor. I have not yet done Ancestry DNA testing but I think I should, but also are prepared for the odd occasion that the DNA may reveal that the flame haired milkman may be an ancestor of mine as opposed to the mothers husband.  However whoever raised each ancestor of yours is what counts. Someone once said if they did that then does it matter if they were not the bio father/mother/parents?

[SMJ]

I would advise anyone who is thinking of DNA testing to do it. The more data there is in the system to compare against, the more accurate the predictions can become over time for future testers.

I get the feeling the data set for Wales and the Marches is still quite small leading to prediction inaccuracies. There isn't the same marketing capacity that drives the industry for Wales as there is for the Scottish and Irish expats living in the USA etc.. The companies don't publish their modelling methods so it's very difficult to judge if the sample size is sufficiently large to give the predictions they advertise.

I know I have Welsh ancestry from the paper trail back to at least the 1780s on my Paternal side with a continuous movement across the border between Shropshire, Denbighshire and Flintshire over the years. When I got my LivingDNA results in 2019, the shared Welsh contribution in total was only 1.5% for N Wales and I had 0% for the area where I was born. As more data has since come in from other testers, the N Wales value is now 2.4% and SW Borders 2%.

What was very useful was my Y-DNA coming up as J2-L26. This immediately throws up the knowledge that my paternal line was very unlikely to have been walking the Welsh borders (or anywhere in the British Isles) at the time of the Iron Age. Anytime from the Roman invasion through to the Normans, the Huguenots, to the modern day is a workable time frame. Of course there is always the possibility of a NPE along the way somewhere too.

Another lesson is that surnames can and will change if you are outside the families of the well documented gentry, especially in Wales where a patronymic or locative names could change very easily in 2 generations as families moved around in the era before formal surnames.

That knowledge now opens up the opportunity of looking at the density of shared Y-DNA against surname clusters - there are very few Jones's with J2-L26 but an awful lot of Montgomerys, very interesting! Shropshire, Montgomeryshire, Roger de Montgomery ... I wonder?

[jane k]

thanks again.
I must admit I am a bit boggled by some of this!  I can`t justify the expense at the moment but perhaps I will ask Father Christmas to chip in at the end of the year

[scrimnet]

Interestingly, the Welsh are actually the remains of the Ancient British tribes that once populated these Isles, often referred to as "Celts''.

They were driven into Wales, whilst the remainder were subject to the Romans, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Scandinavians.

They are probably actually more "British" than the rest of us in "Angle-Land"

 

[Ruskie]

Reference panel for Wales: 883

https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/AncestryDNA-Reference-Panel?language=en_US#:~:text=What%20is%20a%20reference%20panel,DNA%20confirmation%20of%20their%20ethnicity.

[KGarrad]

My ancestors came from various parts of the UK, from Oxfordshire to London and from Co Durham to Dorset. I have some French Huguenot ancestors, a bit of Scottish and some very distant Italian, Welsh and Irish thanks to a gateway ancestor. I have not yet done Ancestry DNA testing but I think I should, but also are prepared for the odd occasion that the DNA may reveal that the flame haired milkman may be an ancestor of mine as opposed to the mothers husband.  However whoever raised each ancestor of yours is what counts. Someone once said if they did that then does it matter if they were not the bio father/mother/parents?

It's the old Nature v Nurture debate?

FWIW I haven't done a DNA test, and I am unlikely to do so.
I have a well documented tree with paternal line back to 1550, and maternal  (2 lines) back to mid 1500's.

[Albufera32]

Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as Welsh, Irish, Scottish or indeed Viking DNA. Nor, if you read the small print, do companies such as Ancestry claim there is.

What Ancestry actually does is match your DNA sample against other samples from their database which are considered to represent a particular ethnicity because they and their ancestors have lived within a particular part of the world for several generations.

So having "Scottish" ethnicity does NOT mean you have "Scottish" DNA it simply means you have some DNA which is common in people living in Scotland today, or whose families lived in Scotland for many years.

My own ethnicity for example is registered as 96% Scottish, which makes sense since virtually all of my Ancestors do indeed originate here, but given that my maternal grandparents lived in the COwal Peninsula for generations, it seems exceptionally unlikely that none of them married into families of Norse descent somewhere along the way. So why does almost all of my DNA inheritance come up as Scottish?

Simple. The Norse settled so widely down the coasts of Scotland that practically everyone living in Scotland today has some Norse descent.

As I understand it, the situation goes something like this. Ancestry slices up your DNA into fragments and matches those fragments up with it's databases. A specific fragment will generally show up in varying amounts in several different groups, but Ancestry assigns it to the database which has the highest percentage of the population having that fragment. So if the vagaries of war, famine, population migration and dominant or recessive genes means that 1000 years after one of my ancestors inherited a specific DNA fragment from a Norse settler, that fragment is now more common in those from Scotland than those from Norway, Ancestry assigns that fragment as being "Scottish."

Contrary to all you may see, that's all it does. Ancestry (and every other similar company as far as I am aware) does not say I am "Scottish." All it says is that I share more DNA with people in its Scottish Database than any other.

Having said all that, I agree with the several posts stating that DNA is much more valuable in finding matches to your tree than in ethnicity for those researching their family history. The ethnicity estimates can be a useful pointer, but little more.

[coombs]

French are a mixture of Germanic, Celtic and Gallo Roman people. As said, "Irish DNA" is just DNA found commonly among Irish people. I think many Northern Italians have Germanic DNA, and some with Norman DNA.

[Rena]

I know very little about the Ancestry DNA testing other than that the results are dependant on the number of people around the world who have already taken the test.

My interest is simply that I have a very Welsh maiden name - Howell - but despite tracing my tree back to the 1790s have not found anyone who was actually born there (presumably because they left Wales at some point prior to that to find work in the English midlands).

Would the DNA test tell me if I do actually have Welsh ancestry?  And if so would it single out a particular area of Wales?

(Please bear in mind my lack of knowledge and keep explanations to words of one syllable!)

Many thanks

I think you need to get further back than the 1790s, as this was the period when the "Industrial Revolution" took off and millions of people moved around the British Isles.