Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
There are disreputable genetic testing companies that really are scams. Some companies are considered reputable but can still be inaccurate. I think the way Ancestry advertises their product is very misleading, with customers placing their full faith in their ethnicity results and making travel decisions and redefining their racial identity based on them. A Hispanic woman in one commercial states she now checks the "other" box on forms because her results say she is "from everywhere." People who don't know their true ancestry (like adoptees and African Americans) are given false hope. I think that is pretty much false advertising and people do take these tests with the expectation that they are accurate without reading the fine print. I really disagree with the way the tests are marketed and can understand why some people would call that a scam.
I did initially take a bunch of the tests as an adoptee wanting to find biological family and was very misled by the ethnicity results. Some were saying I was heavily Scandinavian, so I was looking for a Swedish grandparent, LOL. I didn't think they were "scams" per se because my real purpose was to find family which I did, eventually (not Scandinavian at all), and these tests helped me do that through cousin matching. If the cousin matching was a "scam" it would never have led me to my actual biological mother and father who I was able to find by connecting trees of 3rd and 4th cousins. Only then could I research my actual ancestors and learn where they were from. I didn't need ethnicity estimates anymore and think of them more as parlor games. All of them are really bad at picking out German ancestry which is a huge problem because so many Americans have that ancestry and expect that to appear in their results.
Lots of us have been there. I used the ethnicity reports to try and track down a few "mystery" ancestors, and only found one. The Ancestry.com "Iberian" region was broad and my grandmother and uncle had 10% there. I figured it had to be an ancestor........but probably not. No cousin matches, Ancestry reassigned that DNA to England in the last update. Whoops!
My FIL is already creating narrative about his new 50% Italian update. He is a very smart guy who understands genetics pretty well, but is convinced this update means he descends from the Venetians and other Italians who had possession of the Greek islands during Crusader times (and multiple periods since.) I try to explain that he surely has ancestors from these population movements, but all of his cousin matches and all other testing services confirm him as the grandchild of 4 Island Greek immigrants. Frankly, I am surprised I haven't found any distant Italian cousins, none at all. If there was mixing in the last few 100 years, the Italian cousins haven't taken the test yet...........more likely there hasn't been much (or any) admix between his ancestors and Italians in the last several 100 years.
I took a test to look at the cousin matches and don't really care about ethnicity percentages. The matches are accurate in regards to showing your relatives.
There are disreputable genetic testing companies that really are scams. Some companies are considered reputable but can still be inaccurate. I think the way Ancestry advertises their product is very misleading, with customers placing their full faith in their ethnicity results and making travel decisions and redefining their racial identity based on them. A Hispanic woman in one commercial states she now checks the "other" box on forms because her results say she is "from everywhere." People who don't know their true ancestry (like adoptees and African Americans) are given false hope. I think that is pretty much false advertising and people do take these tests with the expectation that they are accurate without reading the fine print. I really disagree with the way the tests are marketed and can understand why some people would call that a scam.
I did initially take a bunch of the tests as an adoptee wanting to find biological family and was very misled by the ethnicity results. Some were saying I was heavily Scandinavian, so I was looking for a Swedish grandparent, LOL. I didn't think they were "scams" per se because my real purpose was to find family which I did, eventually (not Scandinavian at all), and these tests helped me do that through cousin matching. If the cousin matching was a "scam" it would never have led me to my actual biological mother and father who I was able to find by connecting trees of 3rd and 4th cousins. Only then could I research my actual ancestors and learn where they were from. I didn't need ethnicity estimates anymore and think of them more as parlor games. All of them are really bad at picking out German ancestry which is a huge problem because so many Americans have that ancestry and expect that to appear in their results.
This is a very interesting post, thanks for contributing.
The Scandis really got around in their day, as you probably know. Some French nationals, for example, with deep roots in their country, could come up as Scandi. (Due to the Normans.) Same with some Brits. And Russians and Ukrainians, for that matter. Kind of like how some Native Americans come up as Asians on some tests. But IDK; maybe you're not even European, so Scandi really would be way off base.
Last edited by Ruth4Truth; 07-02-2019 at 01:02 PM..
Thanks for the info. Yes, low percentages could just be noise, but that's not the same thing as the OP claiming unless it's above 80%, it's bogus. Lower percentages than 80% can still be legitimate results. Does the guy in the video say anything about only percentages above 80% being valid, or was the OP hoping no one would know Russian so he could just claim the video says whatever he wanted it to say?
I wouldn't say that. I'd say the ethnicity report is subject to interpretation. Fortune telling is completely random - DNA interpretation is not, there IS a scientific process to each step of it, it's just not an exact science.
I would take issue with that claim of his. If you share a certain amount of DNA with someone, you are without a doubt related within a genealogical time frame. I don't know what genealogy shows they have in Russia, but here in the US, the relatives they find are usually fairly close cousins, where there is no question of a recent common ancestor. Exact amounts you may share with someone can vary by the company, but not by so much that a close cousin is not actually a cousin at all. Plus, they back up DNA relationships with traditional genealogy research and triangulation. You put all of that together and it's actually amazingly reliable (to a point - once you get too far back on your tree, or share too little DNA with someone, it becomes less reliable).
I've never heard of this before - the only DNA which is specific to a certain lineage is Y-DNA (which women don't have) or mtDNA, which is only one line of your tree (so mtDNA can't show you more than one line). Autosomal DNA is (and always has been) from every branch of your tree and there's no way to zero in on any given branch or line, so it's not like one autosomal DNA test can be for one great grandparent and another for a different great grandparent. I guess maybe one of the tests she did could have been mtDNA and the other autosomal? But if they were both autosomal, the differences between them likely had to do more with different companies using different reference panels and algorithms. If this was a long time ago, it's possible they were still using companies who only looked at individual markers rather than the combinations of markers they look at now. In short, those older ones are now considered completely unreliable as there are no single markers found in any one area of the world - combinations of markers are much more reliable.
Thanks for this feedback; I was hoping for something like this.
I don't recall him mentioning anything about only percentages of 80% and up being accurate. Rather, he said, that the percentages aren't completely accurate (vs. no accuracy at all below a certain point). IOW, a report of 22% whatever might be closer to 15% or maybe 25%. But I'd have to listen to it again, to make sure I didn't miss something.
He did include a point that seemed odd to me, about how the computers are set up to find matches, and all humans will match insofar as we all have the same organs, the same biological structure, so the computer will find matches on that basis, as well as on the ancestry basis. That point sounds completely bogus. I left it out of my first synopsis, because it sounded so far from left field.
Some Russians have an extreme cynical streak, so they naturally shrug everything off as fake.
Thanks for this feedback; I was hoping for something like this.
I don't recall him mentioning anything about only percentages of 80% and up being accurate. Rather, he said, that the percentages aren't completely accurate (vs. no accuracy at all below a certain point). IOW, a report of 22% whatever might be closer to 15% or maybe 25%. But I'd have to listen to it again, to make sure I didn't miss something.
He did include a point that seemed odd to me, about how the computers are set up to find matches, and all humans will match insofar as we all have the same organs, the same biological structure, so the computer will find matches on that basis, as well as on the ancestry basis. That point sounds completely bogus. I left it out of my first synopsis, because it sounded so far from left field.
Some Russians have an extreme cynical streak, so they naturally shrug everything off as fake.
When you take a commercial DNA test, you aren't paying to sequence your entire genome. All humans share like 99.9% of our DNA in total.
More or less, these are short segments of DNA that do differ between individuals, and populations, and are passed down by common descent, hence their applicability for cousin matching.
Reviewing my Ancestry Matches, I noticed someone who came up as a 4th Cousin DNA match with the same surname as my maiden name.
Just looking at his very limited tree, I knew that his Great-Grandpa was the younger brother of my Grandpa. Very easy. Didn't even need to do any research for that. I did contact him and told him that, if he is interested.
Sounds like OP got a result he isn't happy about. Haha. I was happy about mine, 100% Northern European - predominately British with some German and Scandinavian in there.
Rather, he said, that the percentages aren't completely accurate (vs. no accuracy at all below a certain point). IOW, a report of 22% whatever might be closer to 15% or maybe 25%. But I'd have to listen to it again, to make sure I didn't miss something.
Being in scientific research, I would assume all the percentages any of these companies give you must have some sort of error bar (or confidence band) associated with them.
Just going back to my Ancestry results, if I click on the 3% Ireland & Scotland and open up that region, it clearly says Range: 0% - 6%, on my 9% Baltic States it states Range: 0% - 26% for that region and for my largest region, my 88% Eastern Europe & Russia it states Range: 83% - 100%. Obviously you can't have all your percentages add up to 110% or 120% or 125%, these companies have to at least give your results out of a 100% total.
For me, while I think the % ethnicities are interesting, I see that more as a conversational thing to bring up at get togethers and what not, I rather look at the DNA results to find distant cousins who can help me (or maybe i can help them) break down certain walls for certain branches of my family tree.
Being in scientific research, I would assume all the percentages any of these companies give you must have some sort of error bar (or confidence band) associated with them.
Just going back to my Ancestry results, if I click on the 3% Ireland & Scotland and open up that region, it clearly says Range: 0% - 6%, on my 9% Baltic States it states Range: 0% - 26% for that region and for my largest region, my 88% Eastern Europe & Russia it states Range: 83% - 100%. Obviously you can't have all your percentages add up to 110% or 120% or 125%, these companies have to at least give your results out of a 100% total.
For me, while I think the % ethnicities are interesting, I see that more as a conversational thing to bring up at get togethers and what not, I rather look at the DNA results to find distant cousins who can help me (or maybe i can help them) break down certain walls for certain branches of my family tree.
Thank you, this is helpful. I've never had mine done. I did have a cousin submit his, because I wanted to see what the male line came out as. It was a different type of test. We were always told we were German, but I found out we weren't; we're from a territory that got taken over by Germany that was ethnically distinct (non-Germanic).
But what I find confusing about these ancestry ones, is that they give the info in terms of countries: Ireland, Scotland, France, Russia/Eastern Europe, etc. It's too vague. Why don't they provide the haplogroups and the migration lineages (M269, or whatever) instead? That really pinpoints it. "France" could be anything, from Basque to Norse, Frankish (Germanic), to Celtic. "Russia" could be Indo-Iranian (R1a), Scandinavian (Rib or possibly I), Finnic/Uralic (N3), not to mention the Jewish lineage. I can't relate to the way they do it.
Is it because it's a more superficial test? I'm not interested in finding cousins and so forth. I want to know where my 4 grandparental lineages fit in with the map of the original peopling/s of Europe.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
