I gathered my birthday money this year to pay people to analyze my spit. It's exciting to see the genetic side of family history come alive. No minorities in my blood, because according to AncestryDNA, I am a 100% European descendant. Not a huge surprise there, but I did get a big one.
With 47% Great Britain (Scotland, England, and Wales), 28% Europe West, and 10% Ireland it was not totally expected, since I thought I would be nearly 100% from Great Britain and Ireland, but the big shock for me came with 10% Iberian Peninsula.
That's a relatively large percentage for a country with which I haven't found a genealogical connection yet. Above my percentages, though, it does clearly state, "Thousands of years ago Ethnicity Estimate." I know that those regions are all connected or relatively close, but I had no idea anyone, especially recently, may have come from Spain or Portugal in my direct family. It could be that the Iberian relatives immigrated to other parts of Europe hundreds of years ago, but still, 10% seems significant. The low confidence regions were Scandinavia at 4% and Europe East at <1%. No Italian or Greek. That is my genetic make-up.
I understand there are still some limitations in genetic testing for regions and, since from each parent we only get half of their DNA, and our siblings get different "halves."
I am not adopted. My great-uncle Kim Johnson tested, and it showed our genetic relationship as "first cousins" or an equivalent. It connected me as "second cousins," "third cousins," and so on up to 336 pages already to people on both my mom's and dad's sides, some of whom my parents recognized as their cousins or cousin's family members.
Ancestry also found that with my family members' birth places, they are 95% confident I belong to the "Mormon Pioneers in the Mountain West" genetic community. Well, yes.
Before receiving the AncestryDNA results, I'd been referencing BYU's
Pedigree Pie to visualize the information on familysearch.org. It calculated using the last eight generations, but was limited by the information users have found and provided. Based on that the last 8 generations have all come from The United States, Canada, or the British Isles, so I need to get back into my Countries of Origin research to look for Spanish or Portuguese family members. Some websites suggested that due to migration, the genetic code of people with grandparents still living in the same region might be different than that actual DNA of the ancestors who may have lived in those same regions centuries ago. There is still much to learn. As far as I can tell, AncestryDNA plans to continue updating information with technology and higher numbers of samples, so I'll have to review it regularly.
Dad said he might have his testing done soon, which will help me get a sense of which regions come from his side, and which by default belong to Mom's side. I'd really like my Great-Uncle Bob on her side to test as well, because that side is one of the shortest lines we have, and I want more answers. I know you don't own a computer, Bob, but it would sure help.
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| My Pedigree Pie estimates, which used birthplaces of 8 generations back on familysearch.org to estimate my genetic make-up (unknowns in black). Because the last few generations were born in the U.S. it counts that in the percentages. |
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| My Pedigree Pie estimates with extrapolations using birthplaces entered into familysearch.org |
