A Sceptical View of Ancestry Ethnicities

Started by Admin, 27 Jun 2023

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Admin

( posts)

27 Jun 2023

According to Ancestry, my ethnicity breaks down as:
England 49%
Scotland 20%
Sweden & Denmark 15%
Wales 12%
Norway 2%
Spain 2%
I have no argument with the English bit, and indeed Ancestry narrows it down to a very plausible Devon & Cornwall and Central Southern England. However I struggle to see how Scotland, Wales and Scandinavia can find their way into my DNA.

I have traced almost all my direct ancestors back to the early 1700s and apart from a very small number for whom I have no birthplace, every single one of them was born in Devon or Somerset. In fact they don't even spread out over the whole of those counties and there is a strong bias towards the upper part of the Exe valley. For those I don't have a birthplace for, there is no alternative evidence to suggest they came from outside the area.

According to Ancestry, they rely on a "Reference Panel" of people who are native to a certain place and have a paper trail to prove it. Well, given that few people would have many proven written records back to before 1700 (probably not even that in many parts of the world), I would have thought I would have fitted into the criteria for the Reference Panel. Instead I am told that only half of my ethnicity comes from the place that every known ancestor was born in.

Obviously ethnicity needs to be related to a point in time. If you go back far enough, we're all Africans! But if you are going to rely on a paper trail you are really setting that point to somewhere around 1700, plus or minus quite a lot.

I'm not going to stick my neck out so far as to say that Ancestry is wrong. But I will need more evidence before I say that they are right.

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Admin

(18 posts)

22 Aug 2023

My ethnicity on Ancestry has changed very slightly (in their terminlogy). It is now:

England & North-Western Europe 49%
Scotland 20%
Sweden & Denmark 15%
Wales 12%
Norway 2%
Spain 2%

In comparison, the very same DNA test is interpreted by MyHeritage as:

England 60.4%
North & West Europe 26.3%
Scandinavia 9.2%
Finland 4.1%

So if I lump England and North-West Europe together MyHeritage finds 86.7% compared to Ancestry's 49%.
Adding broader Scandinavian ethnicities together on both of them, Ancestry gives 17% compared to MyHeritage's 13.3%.
Ancestry's total of 32% for Scotland and Wales is a big fat zero on MyHeritage.

I find the 4% difference for Scandinavia acceptable. The huge discrepancy for England, North-West Europe, Scotland and Wales suggests to me that at least one of the websites is wrong.

All of my paper research leads me to believe that MyHeritage is far more likely to be at least more correct, even if I can't say it is totally accurate. Of course a big question mark lies over the point in time where you measure all of these ethnicities. While the Celtic countries (Scotland, Wales, Ireland and to an extent Cornwall) might be considered relatively pure Celts dating back over 2000 years, England has been a melting pot for millenia. Pre-Roman invasion we might also be pure Celts, but then add in Roman (all of the Roman empire!), Anglo-Saxon (Germany), Viking (Scandinavia) and Norman (who themselves were Vikings) and we are a pretty mongrel race even before you add in other in-comers from France and the Low Countries. Perhaps all these companies are just trying to be too clever and to sub-divide ethnicity down into impractically small elements.

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