To think these DNA ancestry tests make no sense

@cake or wine, I said you only inherit around 1% of your DNA from “a 4G grandparent” you have 64 of them. Please read a bit slower, as you are missing key qualifiers.

If it’s Niall of the Nine Hostages, he was an Irishman that went raiding all through Europe, especially Wales. But since he wasn’t Scandanavian, it wasn’t called “going Viking”

Thank you @Fiveyearsleft

Genealogists. With an “a”. 🙄

dna testing is a big thing in the genealogy world. Thought you’d know that, what with your genetics degree.

the university of Strathclyde have a genetic genealogy conference next month. Maybe you should attend. You might learn something. https://www.strath.ac.uk/studywithus/centreforlifelonglearning/genealogy/advancinggeneticgenealogy/

Geneologists?

Or scientists?

I thought geneologists just traced family trees

No

You inherit all your DNA from your 4G grandparents.

Where else does your DNA come from?

It's just different 4G grandparents.

Just as all your DNA comes from your parents. You just get 1 of your Dad's chromosome 1 and one of your mum's chromosome 1.

Your mum got 1 of her chromosome 1 from her mum and the other from her Dad. And 1 of those ended up in you.

And all their DNA comes from their parents.

If you looked at all your 4G grandparents and looked at all your chromosomes, you should be able to match up each of your chromosomes with the 4G grandparent it came from.

They do. That’s how they figured out that Neanderthals and other early humans didn’t go extinct but are part of modern human ancestry.

You do realise that the DNA ancestry that is "analysed" by the DNA companies only goes back about 6 generations....

And I guess you have some ancestors who came from before 6 generations ago?

“The celts" were bigged up by the tudors, but they never really existed outside the PR machine.”

The PR machine meaning all the archaeology and ancient history departments of top Universities? The British museum? I can assure you that the Celtic peoples existed. The term “Celt” is a catch all like “Germanic” or “Chinese” covering multiple ethnicities and/or tribes/kingdoms that had shared/overlapping cultural practices, identities, religions and similar linguistic roots.

Because you only inherit 1% of your DNA from a 4G grandparent. Going back further than 6 generations and you’d only register the majority ethnicity of multiple ancestors.

“Viking” isn’t an ethnicity anyway. It was an occupation held by many Scandinavians of different ethnicities. Similarly, not every Scandinavian was a Viking.

I don’t know if this will help, but take heart - I know I can’t imagine how it feels, but I do know answers can happen with these tests. My best friend’s father was adopted. He took one of these and it popped up a relative he didn’t know who would have had to be I think cousin level? (It was really his only chance as there was no paperwork about his adoption or something was wrong with it - long before computers). He finally contacted them, and they responded and he now has the identity of his mother and father, knows that he has both full and half siblings, understands how he ended up being adopted. It’s been a huge act of fulfillment for him.

No all. The Basques and Catalans don’t. The Swiss don’t. Occidental French don’t. Piedmont Italian don’t. Greeks don’t. Sardinians, Corsicans and Maltese don’t. Much of Eastern Europe don’t, although Russia does.

I’ve done my ancestry, there is no Viking ancestry in my DNA. Why don’t you understand that? It’s very odd.

@ChaosAndCrumbs your post was excellent. As an adoptee I have always been on the "search" one way or other to know about "where I came from" and I am currently waiting on results from one of these tests. Certainly for me I'll take any small chance of finding out something about myself. It's hard to imagine if you're not adopted how it feels.

So many interesting takes being made by the op 🙄

I think the poster has read Simon Jenkins who has a book about a sceptical history of the celts. Its an intersting read. Although i didnt get to the end.

Estimates are about 1% to 2% of births are not the father expected. You'll see much higher percentages quoted, I've seen people say up to 25% but there really is no proof for that. DH's g grandmother was 7 months pregnant with her first child (DH's grandfather) when she married, and her new husband was stated as father on the birth certificate when the baby was born. DNA has proved that he was not the father, and has indicated a specific surname and area of the UK where the father was from.

And of course before 1855 in Scotland and 1837 in England/Wales there was no such thing as a birth certificate anyway.

Care to address my earlier point about many Brits being descended from more recent immigration?

I’m fairly sure that my neighbours who came to the UK from Jamaica in the 1960s regard themselves as British, as do their children and grandchildren who were born here. I’m also fairly sure they don’t have any Viking DNA.

Having done my own genealogy as far back as is possible, it is safe to say we will all have rouge genes. That is to say the real father is not the person on official records, births and marriages etc.

My son has a y haplotype that is a mutation that likely occured in Ulster in the 5/6th century AD (M222). Problem is, his dad's family down the male line has a knightly Norman surname and they all thought the family came over with the Normans (previously Vikings of course!).

Clearly they are descended from a chap named Niall in Ireland long before the Norman conquest/Viking raids whose descendents blagged themselves a posh surname somewhere along the line 😂

See, I thought the ‘you can only be Jewish if your DM is Jewish’ was more of a cultural thing rather than scientific. Both my DPs were Ashkenazi Jews, as were all 4 dDGPs. So I did expect the results to show a high proportion of Eastern European ethnicity.

I just had no idea it would show what % Jewish I am. That really surprised me as I didn’t realise it could be scientifically measured. I still wonder if you can be 100% of anything though . I have cousins who have a South East Asian eye shape with mono lids and some are very fair skinned. My DBs have very olive complexions and (did ) have thick curly black hair. They look very Middle Eastern. I’m very pale. But there was no mention of any other part of the world, just Lithuania and surrounding countries.

Thank you.
Some people's bonnets are so full of bees they can't hear what anyone else is saying... 😏

Geneologists should go back to the early humans if they really want to look at ancestors and where we "come from"

Who are you to tell genealogists (correct spelling) what they should be doing? Genealogists explore the branches of their own family trees which they are interested in investigating, using records to do do. Or help clients look into their ancestors' pasts. Nobody has ever ever asked me to explore the life of their most distant ancestor, living in a cave in Africa.

Stop being deliberately obtuse.

Reported. Let Mumsnet sort it out. Maybe they’ll do nothing, but at least I didn’t sit by while you insulted real, existing people, particularly in Scotland and Ireland, in Cornwall and Brittany, on the Isle of Man AND in Wales, who are fighting to protect their original languages.