I blame Dances With Wolves. It suddenly became way cool to have NA ancestry. Who wouldn’t want Wind In His Hair or Kicking Bird as an ancestor. 
The ethnicity reports are wildly exaggerating what they can tell you by being reported as tenth of a percent or even by whole percents.
I’ve tested with Ancestry, 23andMe, Myheritage and had my Myheritage data analysed by FamilyTreeDNA. These are basically the four companies with the largest databases. The results vary a lot. For Finnish and British the estimates range from 0-8 %. I have known, and DNA-confirmed, Finnish ancestry. I have no known British ancestry.
Some of this of course has to do with the confidence level the companies choose. 23andMe say they have 50% confidence in their standard report, and allow you to adjust the confidence in steps up to 90%. Here’s how my data changes, leaving out the least significant contributions:
23andMe confidence->…50%…70%…90%
Northwestern European…98.4%…96.7%…87.0%
-Scandinavian…79.5%…70.8%…36.7%
-British & Irish…7.4%…5.0%…<0.1%
-Broadly NW European…8.7%…20.3%…50.3%
Broadly European…0.3%…2.3%…12.2%
Sure, the companies are working on improving their data, but as they get more information, while they will find new patterns that narrow down regions they will also, if they are honest and scientific, find previously identified patterns that aren’t as regional as they thought.
It predates that movie. I remember everyone claiming to have American Indian in their family in the 70s.
Yeah, it seems they are putting new data where it best fits into the old data, without actually explaining any dna results.
My wife’s mother is indigenous Peruvian and her father has Italian and “Irish” blood in there. Except when she got tested, it was 0% Irish and something like 10% Croatian. The rest (Quechua, Spanish, Italian) was as expected. I guess someone, at some point, decided that Irish sounded sexier than Croatian? Who knows.
The amateur genealogist in my family has us tracked back to the early 19th century in Poland and the other side is Bohemian which, even today, it pretty much just a bunch of Czech people. I can’t rationalize spending a hundred bucks or more to almost certainly learn “Yup, you’re Eastern European/Slavic”.
Particularly since white America spent its first 300 years trying to exterminate them all. I’m sure the irony is not lost on Native Americans.
Croatia is almost right next door to Italy (or, just across the Adriatic), and parts of that region have shifted back and forth between the nations over the years. Lidia Bastianich is living proof of that. But there is a strong Italian influence along much of the coastline.
After seeing GEDMatch mentioned here yesterday, I uploaded my info to see what they said about my heritage.
Wow, they have about six heritage determination models, and none of them are nearly as warm and cuddly as the popular genome sites. Often they break down into things like “Western hunter-gatherer” and “Neolithic farmer.”
So I didn’t get much value out of the info about my European roots. The one interest point was that they all identified between 1% and 2% of either Siberian or Amerindian genetic material. I understand that it’s not always possible to tell the two apart, so I’m going to guess that the Mongols influenced my genes somewhere way back.
That’s true. The Irish thing could just be made up from whole cloth rather than a “replacement”.
I do enjoy the commercial with the guy who thought he was German finding his Scottish ancestry. Yeah, fella, your *family *is German, but you’re half-Scottish. Ask your mother.
My father’s family legend was that they were part Native American, meaning that I should be 1/16th. Results came back showing nothing, but did show a small sliver originating in Albania.
Since we can’t track that one individuals ancestors, my pet theory is that he was Albanian, he moved to the USA, ended up on Wisconsin, changed his name to blend in and made up some new ancestry. I just checked and there is in fact an Albanian surname that is only one letter different from my Franco-Germanic surname.
My husband and I both did Ancestry.com. And there were some surprises. His mother swore there was Native Amercian blood in her family since they insisted they were “French Canadian”. Nope - husband didn’t have a drop of Native American blood. Swedish (expected), Irish (not expected), Western European (expected) and a small amount of Italian (not expected).
My father’s parents were born in Calabria, Italy so I was pretty certain I was 50% Italian. My mom’s family talked only of Western European (german & French) and Irish. Being part Irish played a huge role in her family. My results came back as 55% (!!??) Italian, Western European, English and lo and behold not a drop of Irish. So since I assume my dad was 100% Italian that means my mom had some in her too. She was quite shocked at that and very upset that there was no Irish to be found.
These are not valid conclusions to draw based on the known limitations of ethnicity estimation. It doesn’t take that many generations before it’s statistically plausible that minor Native American contributions to the family tree could have washed out of the DNA.
And the reference populations just aren’t many enough to say you couldn’t still have plenty of DNA from several generations living and breeding in Ireland.
The way 23andMe phrased it in my result was that I have more Neanderthal than 85% of their customers, which gave me something interesting if not exact.
Oh, and after decades of being told there’s Cherokee on my mom’s side I have 0 percent Native American but ~3% West African.
I just ordered my Ancestry test kit yesterday. I’m one of the teeming masses who supposedly has Native American ancestry, we’ll see if it turns up. My maternal grandfather’s grandmother was said to be 100% Miami. Most of the family accepts the Native American ancestry as gospel except for one uncle who swears it’s not true.
I’m expecting German, British, and Scottish along with the alleged Native American. I’ll post back when I get my results. I’m kind of excited even though I’m not expecting any surprises. What I would like to find out is if there’s any more unknown branches of my family tree out there. I posted on here a few years ago about how my Gran found out she had two half-sisters she never knew about thanks to some research my cousin did. My great-grandfather apparenty got around, so there may be more relatives out there we don’t know about yet.
My brother had his DNA tested, and we are 28% native American. All of our jaws dropped at that one. And 25% Russian. The rest is northern European, mostly English and Irish.
Since we have never been able to trace our father’s family (he said he was an only child whose parents died young), we figure he might have resulted from a Russian and a native American. How he got to Massachusetts is unknown.
Yikes!!
In my 23andme tenure so far most of the people who’ve contacted me were adoptees looking for more info; right now I’m told there are another 1040 people on the site who share my DNA.
Did you get an Ancestry.com kit or an ancestry kit from another site?
“Miami” seems obscure enough to be plausible. Most Americans say just say “Cherokee” or “Apache” because those are the Indian tribes that are best known in popular culture. When you have people saying their relative is part of the “Pokagon Band of Potawatomi” or something like that, chances are they’re legit because they actually understand the specific tribal affiliation rather than just throwing out a really well-known name.
I got an Ancestry.com kit, I’d been thinking about it for a while and the sale they were having finally convinced me to order. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I have more relatives out there we never knew about.
Sorry for the double post but I didn’t see your post at first. The Miami tribe did live in this part of the country (NE Indiana) way back when so it is entirely possible that my great-great grandmother was Miami. It’ll be interesting to find out.