23andme Ancestry Tests

[WilyWestbrook0]

Anyone done an ancestry test lately?

My parents' results just came in yesterday after mine did earlier this month. They last did tests with another company 3-4 years ago, tests that had some pretty dubious results and sent me on a search that ended up with waaay too much speculation, including a research paper where I claimed Jewish ancestry based on some pretty tentative links, all due to the DNA test results appearing to support some Jewish ancestry on my parents' behalf (that paper got a good grade, but it's not looking so accurate these days now that I've done much more paper trail research indicating Jewish ancestry as extremely unlikely, and have results from a more reputable company showing 0.0% Ashkenazi ancestry on both lines).

Well, things are definitely more precise and refined since then. 23andme not only computed a more accurate looking ancestry composition based on records (no Jewish for parents this time, and no Sub-Saharan Africans in my dad's line), it also connected me and my mom through several DNA segments to maternal Hutterite cousins with surnames Wipf, Stahl, etc. that appear in family records. (Hutterites are not frequently found, most being from South Dakota where my mother's maternal line came from, so the specificity of this finding is far more impressive than someone finding some colonial relatives in Massachusetts.)

All that said, some things still need more refining. They correctly indicate that my father is much more British/Irish (mostly English and Scottish in his case) than French/German, and that my mother is the reverse (my dad has colonial ancestry while my mother's relatives are almost exclusively post-1800 German immigrants on all sides except for one Norwegian line), but they can't accurately predict how much I got from each parent. They have me as roughly split evenly between those populations, yet when I look at my "split view" inheritance from each parent, they attribute incorrect percentages to these populations - namely, that my mom allegedly contributed 15.8% British/Irish to me (when her own results don't even add up past 11% for that population!), and that my dad allegedly contributed 14.3% French/German (when his results for that population are also less).

Oh well. They have me as primarily a hybrid of the Brits/Celts and Germans, which is correct, along with a 5-10% contribution from Scandinavians, which sounds fairly accurate (I have recent and well-documented Swedish on my father's line, and Norwegian, as mentioned, on my mother's line), and more minor South European and East European results. There also appears to be a very small and insignificant (perhaps background noise?) contribution of Native American from someone in my mother's line (0.1%) and an even smaller contribution of 0.05% North African from my father's line (while smaller, this percentage appeared in all three modes: speculative, standard, and conservative ancestry percentage estimates; my mother's Native American line didn't hold up under such scrutiny, whatever methodology is used to compute percentages here).

The fun part now is connecting with cousins on their Relative Finder feature who share DNA and whose family trees line up with what I know on mine.

[gsj68]

ive never done dna test,im luck enough to be able to track my ancestors to at least 1000 years ago but you touched on a pet peeve of mine,jewish,judaism is a religion not a race,breed or dna anyone can become or leave the religion

[WilyWestbrook0]

Wow, a thousand years? Impressive. You must be colonial. My dad's families are, and one line in his goes back to 1200, and a few others to the 1500s and 1600s, but not beyond that. None of my mother's lines can be traced further back than the 1800s except for some Hutterites back to about the 1600s or so. All of hers are recent immigration from Germany or Norway where it's harder to get paper trail.