Yesterday I shared my ethnicity percentages based on my tree. They look a little something like this:
- 62.5% – British Isles (English, Mixed British Isles, Scottish, Welsh)
- 15.6% – Europe West (French Canadian, French)
- 9.4% – Scandinavian
- 6.3% – Some mixture of European Jewish & Italy, Greece
- 6.3% – Iberian Peninsula (Spanish)
As you can see from my screenshot up there, I have some interesting differences between my tree and the DNA I inherited. Here is a comparison of my tree ethnicities and my DNA ethnicities.
The first important note is that those trace ethnicities, 2% or lower, are often considered noise. In my case, those bottom three surprise ethnicities are not backed up by documentation. The first six however, are documented, even the 1% Iberian Peninsula.
The biggest surprises for me are these:
- How little of the French and French Canadian DNA I inherited.
- How much European Jewish DNA I inherited.
- How much Italy, Greece DNA I inherited.
John Costello and his ancestors make up 12.5% of my tree. And yet, I inherited 19% of the three regions he could have contributed – Iberian Peninsula, European Jewish, and Italy, Greece.
And here is where I need to beef up my learning, you see something I read recently caused me to misunderstand a very important point – you inherit 50% of your DNA from each parent, beyond that, it is a random mixture of all that came before them. I had a handful of paragraphs with some interesting questions and insights into some of the nuances of my tree. But those questions and insights were based on my misunderstanding, so I chopped them out. 😉 Thank you Deborah for some helpful pointers! (See her comment below).
I have so much to learn about genetic genealogy. I need to test my siblings and cousins so I can isolate the various pieces of my DNA and do some fancy-science-y-ultra-nerdy-but-oh-so-cool-DNA-genealogy like this.
While I am still learning, and not completely sure of what my next steps are, the thing I keep coming back to is… How can I be 10% European Jewish when I had no idea I had ANY European Jewish ancestry? 10%. That’s a lot of percent. Especially when I didn’t see it coming.
This DNA stuff is oh-so-fascinating. Have you tested? Did you find any surprises?