My sister’s DNA is 97% Western Europe, broken down into three main groups. This agrees with our known genealogy.
The 18th-century migration of Presbyterian Irish was much larger than you imply.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
From 1710 to 1775, over 200,000 people emigrated from Ulster to the original thirteen American colonies. The largest numbers went to Pennsylvania. From that base some went south into Virginia, the Carolinas and across the South, with a large concentration in the Appalachian region; others headed west to western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and the Midwest.
Transatlantic flows were halted by the American Revolution, but resumed after 1783, with total of 100,000 arriving in America between 1783 and 1812.
[/QUOTE]
As frontiersman populating a New World, many had large families, so millions of early Americans had mostly Scots-Irish blood. (Many of the 19th-century Irish immigrants were also Presbyterian, I think.)
You can download your raw data from ancestry and upload it into other dna databases. Gedmatch.com is an interesting one that has several different databases such as ancient lineages back to European hunter gatherers. There’s even one that will predict your eye color based on your data. It was probably 95% accurate determining my eye color which is grey with specks of brown. Their prediction had a little less brown specs.
My ancestry results showed no native American which was a surprise. Family has always said we had Cherokee. In fact I was 97% European, of that 94% British, 6% Irish. I think the British results are a cop out since they are such a mixed diversity. Seems to me most Americans who’ve had multiple generations in the US would have extremely simular dna to the British even if they never had a single ancestor set foot in that country.
Got my mom a kit for her birthday since she is very interested in family genealogy. Her research shows mostly Germanic decent.
Siblings don’t share exact dna. Easiest to describe is like this:
If your father was 100% native American and your mother was 50% Italian and 50% Aisian, you and your sister would have differing amounts of each. So you are 50% native American from your father, but your mother may have given you 40% Italian and 10 Asian and your sister 30% Aisian and 20% Italian.
It’s like taking a deck of 52 cards and dealing you 26 of them. Then taking the deck back and dealing 26 to your sister. Some may be the same, some will be different.
It makes sense. WBY is talking about testing MtDNA and Y-DNA rather than autosomal. She’ll need her brother, father, paternal uncle or male cousin on the paternal line to do Y-DNA testing. If she’s only interested in MtDNA and her sister has already tested then there’s no point in her testing too.
I did both 23 and Ancestry. They gave me very different results. 23 was pretty consistent with our very extensive genealogical research while Ancestry said my biggest fraction was Scandinavian. We don’t see any Scandinavian in our research however.
Since there was a Scandinavian invasion of England, from where I get much of my ancestry, perhaps Ancestry takes a different definitional approach to what Scandinavian ancestry actually means.
Oh, yes, 23 also gave me 1% Oceanian ancestry - imagine that! Never seen any sign of that in our research.
Having that level of Scandinavian ancestry isn’t that surprising even if most of your ancestors came from the British Isles in the 17th and 18th centuries. Both Scotland and England were multicultural mishmashes of Celts, English (i.e. Anglo-Saxons), and Vikings. Areas strongly associated with Viking/Scandinavian settlement are the northeast of England (at one point called the “Danelaw” because it was ruled as a separate Viking kingdom), the Shetland Islands, and the Orkney Islands. Celts clustered in the west of Scotland, including most of the Highlands and the Hebrides and also the Glasgow area, while Anglo-Saxons were prominent in the southeast. The idea of “Scottish” DNA doesn’t really exist as its own concept - rather, empirical data provides “as good as can be expected” levels of matches for people who are sort of related to neighboring groups in very complex ways.
Where did your “Scots-Irish” ancestors settle? The “Scots-Irish” were mostly Scottish Protestants who had been encouraged to settle in Ulster by the British government, and many of them ended up moving on to the Appalachian mountains in search of cheap farmland. You’ve heard of these people - rural mountain dwellers with an ear for Celtic music and a love for the traditional Celtic beverage of whiskey?
Y-DNA and mtDNA lineages are very interesting but it is important to consider that a big part of their story relates to ancient migrations that happened thousands of years before any modern cultures developed. Y-DNA haplogroup “E” is often considered an “African” lineage because it is found more often in Africa than in Europe, but E has been in Europe for ages, likely even before Stonehenge was built in Europe or the Pyramids were built in Africa. Lots of famous Europeans have had y-haplogroup E, including the Wright Brothers, Napoleon, and Adolf Hitler.
I belong to a typically Celtic subtype of y-haplogroup R1b, which itself is sometimes considered an “Asian” type that seems to have entered Europe after the Stone Age from West Asia by cousins of those who had gone east across the Bering Strait land bridge. In other words, my paternal ancestors probably did not build Stonehenge (though they may have worshiped there later), and in any event I am much more closely related to most Native Americans on my paternal line than I am to Le Petit Caporal.
Another major European type, I (subdivided into I1 and I2) is closer to modern Jewish and Arab lineages.
This is all very interesting and is shedding a lot of light on ancient history and systematically destroying the idea of racial purity.
Oh, okay.
Me, I’m more interested in where they lived, and what their actual experiences were, than their actual DNA. And I already know where they came from, so that’s taken care of. Or is this more for people whose ancestors were in the U.S before the great immigration wave?
Sorry I’m late to this thread. I had it done for Christmas 2014. The biggest surprise was that there is practically nothing unexpected. I am 99.7% Northern European … which, when you think about it, is amazing, given that most of my family have been in America for several centuries. Only 0.1% West African heritage, which I bet everybody has. The other .2% are other places in Europe. It put to rest a long-standing family belief that there was Jewish heritage–there ain’t.
Then I fed my genome to Promethease and found out that I carry one allele for phenylketonuria, and that I have hemochromatosis. That was a lot more exciting than the ancestry.
There was just a blog post about this on The Legal Genealogist, where she and all of her siblings had their DNA tested, they came in all over the place and none of them matched very closely. She warns that it’s something interesting to look at but not take it very seriously.
My daughter bought me the ancestry DNA test for Mother’s Day, and I’m very excited. My known ancestry is whatever my birth mother noted on a 3"x5" index card: Scottish, English, German, French. My father “May be German”. I’ve done my adopted parents family trees back hundreds of years, but I am a nobody.
I’m still debating whether I want to find out if I have any familial matches.
