I guess it depends on the company and how they calculate it. Ancestry says my mother is 74% southern Italy, 11% northern Italy, 12% Cyprus and 3% Greece and Albania.
Especially if you are Zaphod Beeblebrox.
That would be remarkable considering how the results are calculated. I’m not sure Italians being primarily middle eastern can be true, either. What happened to all the people from the Italian peninsula - they got wiped out??
If you look two posts above you will see it’s certainly not true on ancestry. I don’t know about other companies
They use the same database as 23andme, so it wouldn’t be true there either.
Ancestry and 23andMe don’t even test the same SNPs (the overlap is less than 25%). What’s your source for these two companies sharing anything in this highly competitive market?
The Iberian peninsula shows up as a major part of modern day Italians. I have Italians on both sides of my family. Most of the dna that I have seen looks pretty similar from both sides.
Here: Press Release - 23andMe Media Center
Quote from them:
"MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and PROVO, Utah – September 9, 2008 – 23andMe, Inc., the industry leader in personal genetics, and Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource with nearly 3 million active users and 875,000 subscribers, have teamed up to provide improved genetic information to Ancestry.com’s DNA customers.
…Users of the Ancestry.com DNA service will now have access to the same ancestral content available through the 23andMe website, designed to give people a deeper understanding of their past."
I’d say that’s pretty definitive.
A friend of mine bought kits for his parents for Christmas a couple years ago. The results came back with a match to 2 grandkids they didn’t know about!
So my friend and his brother took tests and it turns out my friend was the father!
He reached out to one of the grandkids it turns out the mom was someone he had a one night stand with when he was 18 and a pair of twin brothers were the result!
She was a bit of a wing nut and but actually put the kids up for adoption and said she didn’t know who the father might be.
My buddies wife was pretty surprised at first, but accepted it pretty quick. His kids thought it was neat having new half brothers (they were like 18 and 20 at the time).
They aren’t close, but do keep in touch.
So you just never know what you’ll uncover!
MtM
That’s from 2008, right after 23andMe started up and four years before Ancestry.com started offering their own DNA-testing. It’s describing a cooperation where the users of Ancestry’s tools for building trees and searching source databases get access to 23andMe’s DNA-testing, not a sharing of DNA-databases between two testing companies.
My siblings and I found a sister we didn’t know we had. I am 2 months older than her so that means my father was getting some side action. I tried to get that info to my father but his wife intercepted the message. She claimed I’m trying to destroy my 90 year old father’s life. My reply was he did that on his own 64 years ago while cheating on my mother. One of my sisters is also having issues with this but won’t do a DNA test to confirm it.
I have also got to meet some other members from my father’s side, for some reason my father wanted nothing to do with his 2 brothers. And the nuts don’t fall far from the tree on my father’s side. One of his brother’s knocked up a gal, the baby was put up for adoption. I showed up as a cousin to her and together we found her father’s family. A family reunion is now in the beginning stages.
Almost all of the interesting tidbits in my family came from the document searches. The DNA is about what I would expect. I did get in brief contact with a 1st cousin through Ancestry that I knew about but my uncle died before I was born so I didn’t know his kids. The DNA showed more Eastern European than I would have thought if we hadn’t done some research first. I already knew my last name is supposed to be an uncommon Polish name instead of a common German name. When Eastern European showed up it wasn’t a shock. Interestingly enough there was still a decent amount of German since that branch came from the Prussia/Poland/Russian Empire area and I’m sure there was a lot of mixing going on.
My background is from the same general area as @Loach 
. My brother did an extensive family history using available records back about 10-15 years ago (prior to all the current technology) and got us back to the start of the 1900s, when most of my ancestors emigrated from Russia, Poland, (what was then) Austria, and other parts of eastern Europe. The history has ship manifests and photos of some of the ships, plus other records of the time such as where they lived in NYC.
Anyway, I am not so much interested in connecting with long-lost relatives, as I think that was covered in my brother’s earlier work. What may convince me to do the DNA test is perhaps learning the family names of my ancestors, as all of that was erased when they got here (presumably at Ellis Island) where their names were either anglicized or changed totally.
Question: Do you all think learning the family names from the old country could be an outcome of doing the DNA test?
I think this would be something you’d only get from the documents as well. Also, it wasn’t Ellis Island that changed immigrants’ names. When they investigated these claims, they found that it was almost always the immigrants themselves who changed their names.
It’s possible, but a long shot. Two things are working against you:
DNA-tests are much less popular in those countries than the US and some European outlier countries.
The matches you do get are less likely (in my experience) to have useful family trees.
Oh, and to beat a constantly persistent unicorn your family names are very unlikely to have changed at Ellis Island. People arriving there were required to have their papers and the records from the ship, and once they left there they had no obligation to care about any spelling mistakes they had made in their records, they weren’t handing out “official immigrant ID cards” or anything. Just like now naming laws were generally “do whatever you want, as long as it’s not with intent to defraud”. If people were illiterate then later interactions with officials records might have originate changes in spelling unbeknownst to them, but most of the time someone in the family decided to use a version they felt was more American. It might be forced upon them by social pressure, but extremely rarely by officials deciding a name wasn’t acceptable.
OK, seriously thinking about springing for one of these tests (yes, I have some nagging questions about my ancestry, esp. given that I am adopted-did find my birth mother and her side of the family 25 years ago) . Which ones would the Meeming Tillions out there recommend?
If you want to fish in as big a pond as possible and you’re (as you say) looking to connect with/find information on relatives:
Test with Ancestry - they have the biggest database and a focus on genealogy
Upload to MyHeritage - they also focus on genealogy and they allow uploads from Ancestry. You will be able to see your matchlist and, I believe, contact matches. If you have important leads there you can pay to unlock more powerful features.
Upload to FamilyTreeDNA - similar to MH.
If you’re not finding what you need, consider also testing with 23andMe. They do have the second largest database (I think), but a lot of people test just for the health aspect and even though they’ve added a lot of genealogy related feature the number of people who didn’t have that intent when they tested still means you get a much lower response rate to messages.
My anecdotal 2¢: I would use Ancestry, because as noted above, they have a bigger customer pool. They usually run a special around Mother’s day, so if you’re not in a hurry, I’d wait until then. I have about a half dozen cousins on Ancestry, none on 23andme. My wife’s closest relatives were second cousins on 23andme, but she found a niece on Ancestry. T
I did find some interesting things about my family. including one black lady in amongst my overwhelmingly white relatives. Didn’t bother me at all. My wife found 2% native American. I suspect my family was like a lot of others, coming from small country towns where everyone knew every one and they all intermarried with each other. Like the redneck joke that their families don’t “branch.” Wife was adopted, did find her birth mother, who had already passed but apparently never married. I probably want too much, as I wonder (for example) why did my family move from Georgia to Texas after the civil war? Too many questions will have no real answer.
Although that is definitely not a question you can get answered through DNA, and quite possibly not through other research either, it is at least possible you might get further with some more “hard core” research. Maybe there are local histories written, maybe there are wills and probates to learn about your ancestors’ financial situations, property records could aid in same. Researching their community instead of just them could reveal that going to Texas was a “thing”. Etc. etc.