There is a problem with Ancestry Ethnicity Results and I feel they have lost the Trust of Many

[Eolector]

Sorry, but I strongly disagree with your positions.

A few years back I had an Extended Conversation with the FTDNA help desk. They “did not disagree” with my summation that the ethnicity estimates “pretty much show where people with genes similar to yours, and thus share some level of common ancestry, live now.” No one, at any company, has been willing to go into detail on their genetic samples. This is causing a lot of confusion... for example:

As of 2018 I have had autosomal DNA tests from FTDNA, NatGeo2, Ancestry and 23&Me, with further analysis by Prosapia, dna.land and yFull. We have pretty good paper trails to the late 1790s on my father’s Italian ancestors, and the 1860’s on my mother’s Irish and Scots ancestry. My mtDNA links, H7D2A are from Central Ireland, possibly linked through gallowglasses to the Hebrides and Scandinavia. yDNA is I-A8689 (FTDNA) or I-L11949 (yFull) with few, VERY old matches to Germany. My patriline may or may not have served in Constantine’s Palace Guard, the Palatini.

Numbers reported below are rounded. I suspect that many of you will have the same experience of disagreeing results:
• FTDNA recently updated its research and “My Origins” shifted oddly. The first run had me 99% European, the second 89%; British Isles 37% changed to 49%; Southern Europe’s 34% changed to 8%; Western and Central Europe 23% changed to 32% and the Finland and Northern Siberia 5% changed to Zero. Oddly, I now have a Jewish Diaspora-Sephardic component of 11%. No clue where THAT came from, but I suspect they are picking up my deep “Irish” ancestors, who might have spent the last Ice Age in a hypothetical “Iberian Refuge.” My very first tests with them, back in 2003, claimed I had 25% American Indian genes. Perhaps the many Viking raids on Ireland really were Iroquois war canoes? Science changes every day.
• I ran the FTDNA data over at DNA.land, and got Northwest European 38%, Mediterranean islander 20%, Northeastern Europe 11% and South European 10%.
• Ancestry listed me as 55% “Ireland Scotland and Wales,” but from Munster and Kerry (our paper trail leads to Cork and Monaghan); 19% “European South” and in slight confirmation of FTDNA, 14% from the Iberian Peninsula. A bunch of rounding errors included Great Britain, Caucasus, Europe East, Middle East and Scandinavia at 2% each—Contrasting with FTDNA, they hold my European Jewish ancestry to be under 1%.
• 23 and Somebody projects, rounded off, 45% British and Irish, 15% French and German, 12% Italian, 5% Iberian and “Broadly Northwestern European” at 11%, Broad Southern European at 8%. I am amazed (OK, appalled) that they are “confident enough” to predict numbers on the right hand side of a decimal point.
• NatGeo pretty much waved their hands in the air and said “you are from over there someplace”: Mediterranean 42%, Northern European 38% and Southwest Asian 18%. They listed me as 2.3% Neanderthal, 1.9% Denisovan by ancestry, very slightly more Otherly Human than average. For comparison, 23&Me says I have 285 Neanderthal traits, more than 65% of their clients.
• Davidski’s Admixture Tests on GEDmatch—especially the EuK15-- predicted North Sea 30%, Atlantic 23%, Baltic 7% Eastern Europe 11%, West Mediterranean 15%, West Asian5%, East Mediterranean 7%, and a lot of small noise. I ran a bunch of the others just for fun but didn’t keep the results. I highly recommend that you run the Archaic DNA Matches as it can give you a good view of your “deep ancestry.”

Please remember that you are at the cutting edge of a new science and approach to history—your data will be re-analyzed by somebody every time something new is discovered, and that is roughly every day.

[mersch]

A lot of people don't understand the Dna testing either. They get mad when siblings don't have the same dna results. They fail to understand that each sibling gets 50% from each parent, but its not the same 50%.One sibling may not have received DNA from X area, but 2 do. They don't investigate the details of how DNA testing actually works, and expect it to "do" something it can't. Also, boundaries for countries changed over time. For instance, one of my great grandfathers was born in Kindwiller, France. That was a surprise to some, until you research that area and it was part of the Germany area countries, and the part of France, and back and forth with wars etc. It's still fascinating to me. It has helped in the big picture of why I do genealogy, but doesn't answer the minute details of individuals so to speak. Thats my 2 cents on DNA testing.

[NyWriterdude]

Originally Posted by Eolector

Sorry, but I strongly disagree with your positions.

A few years back I had an Extended Conversation with the FTDNA help desk. They “did not disagree” with my summation that the ethnicity estimates “pretty much show where people with genes similar to yours, and thus share some level of common ancestry, live now.” No one, at any company, has been willing to go into detail on their genetic samples. This is causing a lot of confusion... for example:

As of 2018 I have had autosomal DNA tests from FTDNA, NatGeo2, Ancestry and 23&Me, with further analysis by Prosapia, dna.land and yFull. We have pretty good paper trails to the late 1790s on my father’s Italian ancestors, and the 1860’s on my mother’s Irish and Scots ancestry. My mtDNA links, H7D2A are from Central Ireland, possibly linked through gallowglasses to the Hebrides and Scandinavia. yDNA is I-A8689 (FTDNA) or I-L11949 (yFull) with few, VERY old matches to Germany. My patriline may or may not have served in Constantine’s Palace Guard, the Palatini.

Numbers reported below are rounded. I suspect that many of you will have the same experience of disagreeing results:
• FTDNA recently updated its research and “My Origins” shifted oddly. The first run had me 99% European, the second 89%; British Isles 37% changed to 49%; Southern Europe’s 34% changed to 8%; Western and Central Europe 23% changed to 32% and the Finland and Northern Siberia 5% changed to Zero. Oddly, I now have a Jewish Diaspora-Sephardic component of 11%. No clue where THAT came from, but I suspect they are picking up my deep “Irish” ancestors, who might have spent the last Ice Age in a hypothetical “Iberian Refuge.” My very first tests with them, back in 2003, claimed I had 25% American Indian genes. Perhaps the many Viking raids on Ireland really were Iroquois war canoes? Science changes every day.
• I ran the FTDNA data over at DNA.land, and got Northwest European 38%, Mediterranean islander 20%, Northeastern Europe 11% and South European 10%.
• Ancestry listed me as 55% “Ireland Scotland and Wales,” but from Munster and Kerry (our paper trail leads to Cork and Monaghan); 19% “European South” and in slight confirmation of FTDNA, 14% from the Iberian Peninsula. A bunch of rounding errors included Great Britain, Caucasus, Europe East, Middle East and Scandinavia at 2% each—Contrasting with FTDNA, they hold my European Jewish ancestry to be under 1%.
• 23 and Somebody projects, rounded off, 45% British and Irish, 15% French and German, 12% Italian, 5% Iberian and “Broadly Northwestern European” at 11%, Broad Southern European at 8%. I am amazed (OK, appalled) that they are “confident enough” to predict numbers on the right hand side of a decimal point.
• NatGeo pretty much waved their hands in the air and said “you are from over there someplace”: Mediterranean 42%, Northern European 38% and Southwest Asian 18%. They listed me as 2.3% Neanderthal, 1.9% Denisovan by ancestry, very slightly more Otherly Human than average. For comparison, 23&Me says I have 285 Neanderthal traits, more than 65% of their clients.
• Davidski’s Admixture Tests on GEDmatch—especially the EuK15-- predicted North Sea 30%, Atlantic 23%, Baltic 7% Eastern Europe 11%, West Mediterranean 15%, West Asian5%, East Mediterranean 7%, and a lot of small noise. I ran a bunch of the others just for fun but didn’t keep the results. I highly recommend that you run the Archaic DNA Matches as it can give you a good view of your “deep ancestry.”

Please remember that you are at the cutting edge of a new science and approach to history—your data will be re-analyzed by somebody every time something new is discovered, and that is roughly every day.

Many Italians are part Jewish. The Spanish Inquisition forced Jews in Italy to become Catholic, burned them at the stake, or expelled.

[Bernie20]

Originally Posted by ozarknation

Apparently the Basque people are related to the Irish people.
So this is not weird. I only assume that many centuries ago, irish fishermen settled in the atlantic coast of northern Spain/
As I mention many times: Europe is just like a big Nation and people have been moving from one corner to another for centuries.

They aren't related to Irish people and this has been discussed many times. Irish people's closest population is Scottish which I guess explains why Ancestry now have an Ireland & Scotland category.

Here's Ancestry own PCA and people can look where Ireland & Scotland are on here (in between Norway and England and Wales).



Basques are quite distinctive and always form their own cluster but the populations closest to them are French and Spanish not surprisingly.

[Sculptor]

Originally Posted by Einhander

DNA might not lie, but Ancestry is making themselves look bad at the moment.
I was 16 percent Italian and now 9 percent. But my father went from 35 percent to 0 percent. How could I be 9 percent if he is 0 percent? That doesn't make any sense at all. You really can give me an explanation for that? I'd love to hear it!

And if the answer for all this is that the more Ancestry goes back and can track migration, the more the results will change.... Then at some point our ancestors ancestors also migrated and their ancestors migrated. If you back far enough, then we all come from the same place. So at this point, the results will always change until we all are traced back to the same point of origin.

They have lost my trust and like I said at best case, they only showed how much they messed up, even if only for the first time.

I don't believe the ethnicity stuff anyway, Italy, France, Ireland, UK, Norway etc etc are all so small and close to one another they are like American STATES in all effect when you compare land area, and people moved all the time. Ireland is right across a relatively narrow body of water you could easily have boated across, one could have been born in Wales and moved to Ireland but that doesnt really make them Irish.


I KNOW the ethnicity of my parents and know I'm theoretically 50% Italian and 50% Irish because their ancestors imigrated FROM those places. In Ancestry I come up 48% Irish and 36% Italian, the rest is various European etc, it's approximately just what I expected, but forget ethnicity and focus on the REAL value of Ancestry- the DNA matching that positively connects you to family members. Mom got her test done recently, it shows her as my mom in the system with 100% certainty, it shows cousins I met that I now know how they relate as 1st, 2nd and 3rd and they all jive with what the system says. The DNA doesn't lie, the police use it to solve 40 year old murder cases, the ethnicity is just for entertainment and it's all hypothetical anyway, take a litter of 8 puppies out of 2 parents, the puppies are NOT identical, and recessive and polygenic and dominant genes all randomly affect their outcomes, that is why you can get say one puppy with a genetic health problem the rest don't show- but they CARRY the recessive gene for it and can pass it on. The same idea goes for those who sell wolf hybrids claiming the puppies are 7/8th wolf and 2/3rds this, and blah blah blah- genetics doesnt work like that, you dont breed a pure wolf to a dog and get a litter of 50% wolf pups! some of the pups may be almost all dog, some almost all wolf, and others various percentages of each, and so it goes with your Italian father and French mother having 6 children, they are NOT half Italian and half French, like the wolf puppies there are percentage variations and no 2 are the same- even so called "identical twins" are NOT truly identical as science has proven. You could be 25% French and your sister 90% it all depends on which genes you inherited from which parent.