Ancestry updated origins

[NorthWestWoes]

They’ve updated it all very recently. DM now shows as 22% Germanic, I think that was only about 4% before.

A large part of her family tree is south east England - Essex, Sussex, Suffolk. But nothing German or even from the continent unless you go back to 1680, And there are enough DNA matches with the right cousins/ 2nd 3rd cousins to be pretty confident a few generations back. So I’m guessing this is from a strong Saxon/ Angle / Jute ancestry matching quite closely with modern day native Germans.

I only come out as 4% Germanic so even more odd (I know we don’t inherit evenly but her 22% to me 4% is quite a German loss!).

I really hate the new update. I have my husband’s and a friend’s accounts. My husband is adopted and my friend’s Dad doesn’t know his father so we regularly check for new matches.

I hate that it no longer shows you the number of 4th cousins or closer, instead it says “8 new matches” but they are all at 5th cousin or more distant.

Husband has gained Russia and more percentage of Baltics, taken from Eastern Europe.

My friend has gained 46% Germanic Europe from her mother’s side. None identified before, she was mainly English, Scandinavia, Ireland and Scotland. Family is from the east of England, so likely Anglo Saxon.

Oooh! Interesting. DH, adopted, has a 1614cm match who is down as his Uncle or Half Brother. Most likely Uncle due to their age gap, but you never know!

Let us know what you find out.

That’s a lot to lose, what did it give you instead? (Maybe French given your user name?)

Incidentally I notice it’s shoved Brittany in with Scotland, I’d have thought it would be closer genetically to Welsh and Cornish. In fact Breton and Welsh speakers can almost undestand each other.

Did you expect to have some lost relatives or is this a shock?

Could be aunt/uncle (or nephew/niece) or great uncle/aunt, as well as a potential half sibling. Or grandparent.

@FruityShampoo your friend has also got the Anglo Saxon genes then! Seems like it’s less accurate than before then.

Or 1,000 years after invading they’re still genetically very similar to the people they left behind.

As others have said, I've noticed some big changes as well.

My father has gone from being zero Germanic Europe to 11% and previous Scotland has gone from 8% to zero.

Wales has gone from 20% to 9% and the small amounts of Norway and Ireland have been replaced with Denmark.
.

With my mother, Wales and Norway went from 9% each down to zero.

It says that Germanic Europe has been split into Germanic Europe and The Netherlands. She has gone from 2% to 6% combined for the two new regions.
.

But, just to show that you should take this with a pinch of salt, especially the smaller percentages, this is what happened to my DNA regions.

Wales went from 15% to zero and Scotland went from 10% to zero (matching what happened with my parents)

Germanic Europe went from zero to 13% and the Netherlands from zero to 6% (again, matching what happened to my parents but with larger percentages than my parents)

But then, it says I have 1% Norway and, strangely, 1% Basque. Even though these don't show for my parents.

I feel as though it made more sense before the change. The tiny percentages will always be a bit random and a high probability of being wrong. And I can understand that maybe a millennium of south east ancestry could show up as being partly Germanic.

But the other changes don’t match the family tree, whereas before it made sense. And the inheritance I get from my mum is oddly out of kilter compared to what shows up on her account. Looks like I took all her Scottish genes (which are now oddly high anyway given her Scottish ancestry should be 5 or 6 generations back) but hardly any of her heavily Germanic DNA.

The geographic origins always need to be taken with a pinch of salt. There's no reason to think that DNA maps on to modern borders in the way that Ancestry implies.

I gained some more Scottish (I’m now more Scottish than English), lost a chunk of Wales and Ireland, and gained 13% Danish. My Dad’s family were from Sussex, so I presume this came from the Jutes. I also got 2% Cornwall, which is new.

I've been on there for about a decade and mine has changed so many times that I no longer really believe it, except in the loosest of terms. Mine has also just changed to add in the Germanic bit, which was there in a slightly different way when I first joined and was subsequently removed. I suspect a lot of it is to get people to keep clicking or join / re-join.

Over the years, I seem to be mostly from the UK, Ireland and a large area of mainland Europe that extends in to what is now Russia, Scandinavia etc. That pretty much fits with the family history that I do know. Ancestry chop and change the percentages and sometimes remove whole areas and then re-add them. I think you have to take it all with a pinch of salt.

Yes! That’s what I think. If you work it out come back and explain. I suppose if you know one parent is definitely from a certain background it’s easy.
Can anyone help…..

I went from a mix of Italian, French and Spanish with various other random things to 100% Northern Italian, which is what I expected. Haven't seen the new update, though, so will check.

It's now 43% Spanish! Ridiculous.

Yes, you need to know a bit about your parents heritage. Also a good clue is to look at your matches. So if you find you’ve got some unexpected heritage that you weren’t expecting from Parent 2, if your cousin on your dad’s side also has it then you can work out that Parent 2 is your Dad.

The new update is rubbish. It has my family with a high percentage of North Wales. In reality we are South West Wales and Gloucestershire with a smidgeon of Irish. I’ve gone back to the 1700s and there’s no one from North Wales.

Interesting! So you'd get 50 per cent from each of your parents. Maybe this person is your uncle or aunt? I don't know, but it's a close relationship.

You're right. The Scottish and Irish languages are closely connected, and then so are Welsh, Cornish and Breton. (There's Manx too but I can't remember where it fits.)

My parents had me in their late 40s, as did their parents, so my grandparents were dead long before I arrived.

By the time I was old enough to show an interest in genealogy (30s), my parents were dead, so Ive only got snippets of conversations to go on.

My mother mentioned a Scottish Aunt (no sign of her in Ancestry) my father mentioned a ling lost Scandinavian relative (no sign of her either). All my tree is local (Northwest England going back 300 years).

DNA matches are all either Northwest or emigrated to the USA or Australia.

It's so disappointing. It's like they've just made it up.

Ive found that there is some truth in these old stories, but not exactly. So my grandma thought maybe her grandma was French, as her father spoke French. It turns out that the family randomly moved to France (to work on the railways I think) and her father would have spent some of his childhood there.

There are various stories like this that aren’t quite true but you can see how they came about.

I don't care if this is outing.

All my known history going back 4 generations is from the same very small region of medieval villages in Northern Italy near the French border and across the border in an area previously owned by Italy. People did not travel very far. Most of my relatives were peasants who came from the same village of 600-700 people in a short valley. Most known living relatives live in Northern Italy and Southern France. So, originally coming out as mainly Northern Italian with some French made sense, and having a bit of Spanish was a surprise. The subsequent revision to 100% Northern Italian made perfect sense.

This new one of 43% Spanish seems highly unlikely, as the only connection I have with Spain is that my Italian Auntie on my mother's side married a Spaniard she met in England. Their first child was born in England, then they moved to Spain where they had another child. So, apart from this small connection, there is no one from Spain. It is showing as more Spanish from my mother with a bit from my father.

Does this mean that that my one Spanish cousin is skewing the data, or am I to believe that there was some exodus of Spaniards pre-medieval times who bizarrely moved to a very small geographical area in Northern Italy? Can anyone explain how the algorithm actually works?

@MadKittenWoman depends which of your relatives are on Ancestry. Your genetic history is determined by whoever else of your genetic family is on the app and by whatever other algorithms Ancestry are choosing to use at whatever moment in time they do their 'updates'. I've been there for a decade and my genetic history whilst remaining broadly European, has changed many times.

I have gone from about 75% Devon and Cornwall, with Scottish making up most of the rest to 95% Cornish - totally Cornwall on my mother's side and a smidgen of other stuff on my father's.
Rather dull 😕. And where does that leave my mother's granny? She and her ancestors were from Hampshire. Seems like my Cornish DNA has bullied the Hampshire out of my genome!

"...my father mentioned a ling lost Scandinavian relative (no sign of her either). ... DNA matches are all either Northwest or emigrated to the USA or Australia."

My DNA matches on Ancestry are similar; all local or emigrated at various times.

However, I then uploaded our DNA to MyHeritage and that has a lot more European users on it, I found.

For example, on Ancestry my mum has 24,000 DNA matches. Where locations are shown, it's all USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But when we uploaded her DNA to MyHeritage there were only 11,000 matches but there were matches in different countries.

This included 174 currently living in Germany, mostly 4th or 5th cousins with between 8cM and 35cM of shared DNA . I looked at some of the trees and they had been in Germany for generations, although some did have obvious British ancestors more recently.

There were also 132 matches in the Netherlands with similar amounts of shared DNA.

After that there was:

Sweden - 124
France - 118
Denmark - 110
Norway - 109
Ireland - 62
Spain - 22 (although most of these seemed to be Brits who had moved out there)
Switzerland - 19
Austria - 13
Belgium - 12
Finland - 12
South Africa - 11

After that, there were people living in lots of other random countries but it was obvious that they were mostly Brits who had emigrated there at some recent time in the past (although I did find some odd things, like a Russian woman living in Japan with shared DNA).

But there were definitely some countries, like Hungary where there were four DNA matches that were very Hungarian, and two in Poland who were very obviously Polish, where there was no obvious link to any Brits.

All of these links were really distant with usually less than 30 CM of shared DNA.
.

My father had similar results. He has 20,500 DNA matches on Ancestry. On MyHeritage he also had about 11,000 matches. The largest country outside of USA, Canada etc was the Netherlands with 280 matches. These ranged up to 44 cM of shared DNA.

Netherlands - 280
Germany - 166
France - 134
Sweden - 111
Denmark - 80
Ireland - 71
Norway - 65
Belgium - 43
Finland - 34
Spain - 25
South Africa - 15
Austria - 15
Switzerland - 14
Hungary - 10
Poland - 6
.

So, MyHeritage is a good place to look if you suspect that you have some European ancestors.

Well, the latest update has made me regret thinking my grandfather was not who I thought it was.

His grandparents supposedly came over from Bavarian but my original dna showed no Germanic connections.
It didn't really matter because he's long dead and forever will be grandpa to me.
Thankfully it's now showing as 3% Germanic so that makes sense.

What I can't quite work out however is that I've gone from 68% to 84% Scottish.
My DM is 97% Scottish and has stayed the same so I fully expected to be at least half.

Im weirdly proud im only 11% English.

but it makes sense as can trace my dads heritage back to 1600's to the lake district.

so mine actually makes more sense now.

unlike my DD who is disappointed that her scottish has gone down 2% to be replaced by Spanish.

so who knows !

@Pocketfullofdogtreats well, not sure that they’d be an uncle as all my relatives on both mum and dads side are Hungarian. Mum came to the Uk in the early 70’s and dad was already here as he came in 1956.