DNA saya Irish

[blondlygo]

Has this happened to anyone else?

My dna came back 98% Welsh and Irish even pinpoint the town in Ireland. I have never ever heard of Irish relatives.

Is this common? How far back does the dna mapping thing go? I thought from what I read it does not really pinpoint many many generations ago (since we're all relatives if you go far enough back)....

Do the connections to other people tell you anything? There’s been a lot of adoption from Ireland in the 20th century

Well I’m from Leinster but mine came back as 98% from around Manchester. According to the DNA I am 1% Irish even though my family tree goes back over 300 years.
I think it’s because there has always been a lot of movement back and forth across the Irish Sea

Mine came back over 70% Welsh with a surprising amount of German/Icelandic and Scandinavian thrown in there.

My mother's father was Welsh as well as my father's mother. Id 'taken' all of the Welsh parts of their DNA and ended up with a larger total percentage than either of them.

Doesn't mean anything really ofcourse, but it was fun to tease Dad that his english child was more Welsh than him.

This . There are 12 counties in Leinster and Dublin itself is one of them.

I think this article is quite a good read. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/11/question-ancestry-does-dna-testing-really-understand-race

it says it bases the ethnic estimates of other living people. So your dna will have similar markers to people who say they’re from Ireland and that’s how it estimates it. I wonder if a town with a history of a lot of Irish immigration (Liverpool for example) would have similar markers?

Mine surprised me too - all my grandparents were born abroad and family stories abound with adventurers from Germany, French Huguenots, Welsh farmers and Irishmen… then my dna came back as 98% English.

So mine came back
97% Welsh
2% Irish
1% Cornish
Think there may be a little bit of Celt in my family!!

Yes indeed , Liverpool was 25%+ Irish born in the 1850s. Then some parts of Ireland would have quite a bit of English DNA? An excuse to go and visit the lovely Wicklow Mountains perhaps.

Leinster is a province /region not a county , so it could be one of 12 counties in Ireland.

As already said, these tests compare to current people whose data they already have and their self-reporting.

People's results have been updated as more people use the tests and their sample size grows. It's less about your own heritage and more who your DNA closest matches from the data they have.

It can but these tests don't return results from thousands of years ago. I can see its up to between 6-8 generations

We all have far more genealogical ancestors than we have genetic ancestors, due to how genes are passed on, random inheritance model, even what viruses your ancestors were exposed to (current estimates is about 8% of human DNA comes from viruses infecting gametes and their genes passing on). Whether you have an individual ancestor's DNA from even 6-8 generations ago depends on which mix you got from each ancestor. It's not an even mathematical split, and really beyond six generations, the likelihood is really tiny, far less than the percent of us that is human endogenous retroviruses.

Well that's Dublin and surrounding areas so could be any one of millions. It's not that specific.

Sorry if I missed something but what were you expecting from what you already know about your tree? Did you expect the Welsh but not Irish? A lot of Irish people settled in Wales in the mid 1800s. There were also a lot of Irish people in the British forces, particularly younger sons. My Irish grandmother was born in Plymouth where her Dad was stationed during WW1.

Yes I know lots of Welsh and English ancestors going quite far back in some cases.

No anecdotal or tree data about Irish, but dna yes.

I find it exciting

Alls I’d say is I had prior knowledge of my Irish, Welsh and Eastern European heritage and my results were impressively accurate. I’m not saying mistakes are never made but rarely. As others have said, the tests get more accurate over time, as the dataset expands. That is a huge %.

I think the majority of people with UK heritage probably have some Irish ancestry due to immigration. By the time you look back at your 8 Great Grandparents and 16 Great Great Grandparents chances are one of them will be of Irish descent.

I did one once and let’s just say…it turned out to be complete bollocks. I would love to do an authentic one

Reaching out to some of the connections will help.

There is a Genealogy forum on here OP and some of the people who use it do know their stuff and may be able to advise you.

Mine was unexpected, the Irish bit anyway

There was a heck of a lot of contact between Wales and Ireland, both from ancient times to recently. Quite a few people in Wales, especially in the fishing and trading towns will probably have a bit of Irish DNA and vice versa.
Yours may be too long ago for your family to be aware of the Irish connection, so that percentage should be low. If it isn't, the connection is more recent.

Most importantly, does this mean you can get an Irish passport?? I’d love an EU passport!

To be honest, ancestry dna origin results aren’t usually worth getting obsessed about for all of the reasons upthread.
however, this was my family’s experience:
I’ve been researching my family tree for over 25 years now, long before there were even many online databases let alone dna.
i enthusiastically embraced the whole dna testing, my parents were both happy if bemused to take part too. My dad did both autosomal and ydna full tests as part of a worldwide study into our surname.
dads dna came back from ancestry with a 48% shared dna with people living in Mayo, about 100 distant USA matches and an unknown second cousin from his home town. No previous Irish ancestry.
from a lot of further research I can be 100% sure my dads biological grandfather was a member of a local family who emigrated from Ireland and then further members moved to the USA.

no one who could be hurt by this is alive and I suspect there may be a really sad backstory.
but this is why I’d never ever give anyone an ancestry dna test for as a surprise gift.