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!).

This could explain it.
Either a mistake has been made with yours, or one of your parents, or all of you .

@Christwosheds it’ll be a sibling, as above my family are not from the uk.

"Perhaps they attribute it to "rounding errors" like maths problems 😂"

You may joke, but it does appear that this is the case.

I just has a look at the "Basque" percentage and it says:

Basque
1%
Your ancestral region estimate is 1%, but it can range from 0 to 1%

In other words, it is equally likely to be zero.

Interestingly, for my Norwegian ancestry which is also said to be 1% it says:

Norway
1%
Your ancestral region estimate is 1%, but it can range from 0 to 3%

So the 1% seems to be midway in this case. There is a much greater spread. In the previous version I did also have some Norwegian heritage and this does seem to have carried over.

This actually makes some sort of sense.

Ancestry is much more biased towards English speaking countries. Our DNA has also been uploaded to MyHeritage and it was interesting looking at the results.

Most of the matches were British, US, Canadian, Australian, NZ etc but there were also a lot of European matches as well.

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

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 (again, mostly British expats)

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.

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

My father also had very similar results with European matches.

There's a 'hack' that shows you the true % rather than rounded figures:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AncestryDNA/comments/130cib8/dna_hack_instructions/

It seems you might need a paid subscription to see it now, though. I managed to see mine a few months ago but it isn't working for me today.

I think the recent update has worked better for some countries than others.

This update seems to be underplaying Sweden and overplaying Germany (previously it was probably the opposite). And Southern Italy has been way way overcooked. Irish / Scottish is an increasingly muddled mess imho.

I think for the UK it's particularly difficult because if you read the small print certain 'countries' are actually 'also found in the uk'.

So Germanic doesn't necessarily relate to Germany at all. It's a DNA signature which is typical to the UK too and has been carried down in this country for centuries.

A typical very English profile with a paper trail going back 2 to 3 hundred years could easily be English, Germanic, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian because these are all 'also found in England'. But there is a great misunderstanding of this. And it does make the regions somewhat stupid.

That said given WHERE in the UK my family are from my mum's, my dad's, DHs and MILs profile DO make a lot of sense. For my Dad in particular the communities and new sub regions are particularly good and tell a story of his family which we have in paperwork and an element of oral history.

I have to be honest I regard anything under 3 percentage as little more than 'noise' that ancestry can't figure out.

I will also say that for people who have a papertrail that doesn't match your profile, there is always the possibility of an unexpected parent in the chain, may a generation or two back, which throws a spanner in the works.

I can't say this update is any better or worse than the last. My mum has jumped from four regions to seven. I don't think the extra three really say a lot but I also don't think she's lost anything either.