Recently my mom gave me a DNA test for ancestry. I got the results back last week. Some things were surprising (I have no Native American inheritance) and others weren't (I'm mostly British). Here are the percentages:
56% British
17% Irish
14% Western European (including France, Germany, Switzerland, northernmost Italy)
The remaining 13% was mostly Scandinavian, though there were minute (2% or less) possibilities of Spanish, Italian, and Greek, which the test said was unreliable.
The test also identified me as descended from early settlers of central Alabama.
Since my Dad has said his grandmother or great-grandmother (I can't remember which) was Cherokee, I was expecting to see that in my ancestry. It is still possible that she was Cherokee, but I did not inherit her genes.
The test was accurate in terms of matching me to relatives. It matched me with my mother, my aunt, and a cousin in Florida, all of whom also took the test.
It was also interesting to compare my results with my mom's. I am much more British and much less Scandinavian and Spanish than she is, which sort of shows me what I must have inherited from my father, who must be mostly British.
I have been thinking about doing one of those genetic tests. I know (or I think I know) quite a bit about my family's history, at least geographically. It would be interesting to see how much of that carries over to me, genetically. For instance, most of my grandmother's French ancestors were from Normandy, which was has a rather markedly different genetic makeup from the rest of France due to the Viking and Scandinavian settlement there in the early Middle Ages. I would be curious to see if that registers in such a genetic test.
ReplyDeleteI think that would be possible. I don't know of any of my ancestors from Scandinavian countries, yet it is a relatively large portion of my genetics. I'm guessing this is due to Viking invasions of the British Isles. There is also overlap in the genetic zones. "Irish" overlaps with "British" in northern Scotland and "British" overlaps with "Western European" on the northern coasts of the Europe.
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