I know that I’m 1/4 Danish, yet my DNA came back only 9% England and Northwestern Europe. Should it have said 25% Danish, or doesn’t DNA work that way?
What are the rest of the contributors in your profile? On my 23andme test results, England was considered part of the British Isles genetic grouping, rather than lumped in with Scandinavia.there was a larger grouping of Northern Europe’s European, though.
50% European Jewish
20% Germanic Europe
9% Ireland
9% England and Northwestern Europe
12% Other regions
Looks like ‘Germanic Europe’ includes at least part of Denmark:
If you add the NW Europe and Germanic Europe together, you get 29%, which is pretty close to 1/4.
How do you know you are exactly 25% Danish?
Your distant ancestors could have come from outside Denmark or married someone from another country…
And this explains the ‘England and NW Europe’ part:
Presumably that reflects the Anglo-Saxons invading and settling in England. One of the places they came from was Denmark.
Wow! Who knew. Thanks, DemonTree. 
Yep. Thanks!
Glee, my grandmother was Danish, my mom was half, and
that makes me 1/4.
But you assume your grandmother was 100% Danish, all the way back.
This is not likely. Historically, there have been significant population movements between Denmark and north Germany, both ways. Plus, the border has moved more than once. Not to mention connections between Denmark and Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
Your genitic makeup isn’t determined by your parents and grandparents. It’s determined through your parents and grandparents by your ancestors, all the way back.
So much depends on how they define their taxonomies. There isn’t an absolute set of definitions to match genetics to geography, let alone culture/heritage: the best one can do is an approximate (to what degree?) match to the known (how? on what database?) distribution (across which population, defined when and how?) of particular genetic markers (which?). Too many variables to say anything meaningful about any one person, as far as I can see.
Also, as I understand, the ethnic/locality descriptions are more of a suggestion/probability. What is a “germanic” genetic makeup, for example, is likely defined as a smear on the map that is boldest in the general area of Germany, but found to varying extent in several surrounding regions. This is logical, considering there was some decent amount of population mixing all over Europe for centuries (millenia?).
UDS1, thank you for explaining! And thanks to everyone else
who responded.
I would say that the “Germanic” make-up is much more prevalent in the Scandinavian countries than in Germany, which was more exposed to the major migrations of the Middle Ages than Scandinavia. “Germanic” in that sense is not so much related to the country now known as Germany, but refers to those ethnicities in Europe which, historically, have spoken a language from that subset of the Indoeuropean family known as the Germanic languages. The resemblance between the two names is prone to cause confusion - not so much so in the Germanic languages themselves, which use different words for the language family and for the country now known as Germany.
And sometimes, I think they just completely screw up the analyses (something like mislabeling the samples from two different people). That would explain things like one of my aunts taking the test, and getting 0% Germanic, even though Grandma and every one of her ancestors for at least seven generations back identified as German.
I took Ancestry, 23 and Me, and a third test (can’t remember the brand at the moment). All were fairly different in nationality breakdown, and they also didn’t have exactly the same categories. However I am confident that none of them mislabeled my sample, because each test also pointed to people I’m related to whom I already knew were in my family tree.
One thing I didn’t notice in earlier posts: what is it supposed to mean? I have to guess they are trying to provide our genetic balance of what amounts to a snapshot of the human diaspora, after people had spread to the current parts of the globe, but before there was much mixing of nationalities. This isn’t at a clear time, though, is it?
When has there not been a mixing of nationalities, though?
Europe faced many waves of migrations over the course of history. The Greeks famously had at least one large wave of migrants who became Greeks (the Dorians) and there were undoubtedly others (Ionians, perhaps?). Asia Minor became part Greek and part Persian and then later, um, Turkish, plus I’m probably missing some migrations there. Carthaginians (themselves a colony) and Greeks colonized much of the Mediterranean (western Italy was called Greater Greece for a while and remained so after the Romans conquered all of Italy). The Celts and Germans moved around Europe even before they had conflicts with the Romans. The Huns, Magyars, and Mongols invaded and left their mark. The Magyar founded Hungary and the Mongols had a huge influence on Russia and Ukraine. Spain was Basque, Germanic, and Roman-Celtic, and had many Jews and Muslims prior to the Reconquista.
Northern India was conquered by the Mughal (a word for Mongol). However these Mughal were part Persian and part Turkish before intermarrying with Indians, and they came from Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan. Previously India developed Hinduism when Vedic migrants or invaders reached India (from what is now Iran, I think?).
Mesopotamia (Iraq) is descended from many cultures, including some (such as Babylonians) who don’t exist today. These population shifts occurred long before the Muslim conquest.
Not to mention, if we pick on germanic and suggest it includes Scandinavia, that the Vikings spread all over - not just England, but Normandy (interesting name) and then those groups were involved as far as Sicily and Malta and the crusades, where presumably they left some genetic material. Not to mention travel in Europe was extremely common; as was sea travel and trade.
I had been reading about the history of islands: Sicily, which was ruled by Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Germans, Muslims, Scandinavians, Normans, French, and Spaniards. I’m probably missing groups prior to the Greek colonization.
England: Stonehenge was built by the Windmill People, then the Beaker Folk, then the Wessex People, and then Celts worshipped there before the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, Normans all invaded. The Romans were multicultural by that point, so people could literally have come to England from Egypt, Syria, Greece, Iberia, etc.
According to Ancestry, they use reference DNA samples from individuals who have genealogist-verified family trees from a particular area back X generations (I don’t remember what the value of X is). They calculate a “best fit” of your DNA to all the reference samples to determine your heritage. The reference samples and the means of fitting DNA to those samples is different for each of the competing DNA companies, so it is unsurprising that results vary.
The richness of the set of reference samples can contribute heavily to the results. Early on most of Ancestry’s reference samples were from North America and Europe; Asia and Africa were poorly represented. On the first few passes through their algorithm (they update results every once in a while) my almost certain 50% Chinese heritage would come back with a mix of Chinese and Middle Eastern (from the “stans”, making me think that I might have a Uighur great-grandparent). Lately they have been getting more reference sets from Asia and my numbers come up very close to 50% Chinese.