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Recently tested and found that I am 60% Irish and 20% German. The rest of it was a little of this and a little of that. My question is, since I know my mother was Irish and I know my dad was German, is it possible I could have inherited more DNA from my mother? Or did my father have some of that Irish in him also? I am wondering where all that Irish came from.
Which company did you use for your test? That might make a difference. There's no standardized method for these labels and country boundaries have been very fluid over the last 20 generations. I notice, for example, that MyHeritage thinks Iberia includes everything from SE Ireland to Sicily and overlaps France ("North and West Europe"). Baltic lies entirely within the Ashkenazi zone...which takes up most of Europe from Switzerland to Sweden to the Black Sea. These are estimates, at best.
Is your mom 100% Irish and your dad 100% German? My dad was 100% "German" but from three distinct areas...one west, one north, one east. A person can be culturally German but have a wide mix of DNA. My direct paternal line came from a place that changed hands so many times that your head spins...but they were "German" in culture and language.
Not sure on the percentages for my parents as they are both deceased. I guess I was just asking can a mother give her child more than 50% of the child’s DNA? That may just be genetically impossible. That is what I was trying to figure out.
No, it's pretty much 50/50. I got 3,585.1 cM from my dad and 3,586.8 cM from my mom. The ethnicity report is really just an estimate, I would try not to take it too literally. If you tested with AncestryDNA, you will notice that each category you get results in actually shows a percentage range and you could fall anywhere in that range.
I tested with 23 and Me. I am also going to test with Family Tree. I just wondered why the test was skewing so much towards the Irish. And German not so much. I figured both parents contribute equally to a child’s DNA but maybe there was some exception.
Submit your test results (raw data) to MyHeritage for free and see what they report back. Mine was quite different in details...but still European. They seem to break up "Eastern Europe" more than 23andme as I got Baltic and Finnish as separate groups.
On 23andme I get 33.8% British and Irish but on MyHeritage I get 55.4% Irish-Scottish-Welsh. My grandma was 100% Irish from Kerry so I should have 25% (more or less) just from her. I have one family from Devon, near Wales, but back about five generations. I have a little bit of Scottish but not very much. The MyHeritage percentage seems too high based on what I know. The 23andme percentage seems more realistic. Remember, too, that the default confidence level on the general 23andme report is only 50%. You can adjust that confidence level to see a more precise (narrow?) percentage result.
From pictures I look more like my mom’s side who are Irish. Looks may have nothing to do with it, but maybe somehow I pulled more DNA traits from her side than my dad’s. I am so new to this that I thought I had to inherit 50-50.
I tested with 23 and Me. I am also going to test with Family Tree. I just wondered why the test was skewing so much towards the Irish. And German not so much. I figured both parents contribute equally to a child’s DNA but maybe there was some exception.
If you tested with 23andMe then their category that includes Irish is actually the whole of the British Isles - which is a region that shared a lot of DNA with Western Europe/Germany so it's often difficult to tell them apart. The ethnicity report is fairly accurate on a continental level, but sub-continental regions have been intermixing for so long, it's often impossible to tell them apart with much accuracy. It's very normal to get results in neighboring regions of your ancestry, or more or less of a region than expected. Also keep in mind that the ethnicity report is more representative of roughly 1000 years ago, not the last couple hundred. Additionally, although we inherit 50% of our DNA from our parents, we do not necessarily inherit exactly 25% from each grandparent, or 12.5% from each great grandparent. So unless your mother was 100% Irish and your father 100% German, you shouldn't necessarily expect to see exactly 50% Irish and 50% German in your ethnicity report.
On top of all that, ethnicity reports vary depending on the company because they use different sample groups and algorithms. These are my results from several different companies - this will illustrated how it's really just an estimate and you shouldn't take it literally: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...sW3Et4/pubhtml
There are many possible reasons why your ethnicity report isn't exactly how you expected, but getting more than 50% DNA from your mother and less from your father is NOT one of them.
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