The current version.
OK, let’s put away the tam and kilts, I’m apparently back to being a sassenach.
I just happened to look the other day, and Ancestry has again “updated” my personal ethnicity — which is something they think they can do. Of course, they cover themselves by calling it an “ethnicity estimate.” And their estimates keep swinging wildly this way and that. My European ancestors still lie in their graves, unmoving, but, my ancestry keeps skipping around.
Lately, they’ve been sure I’m mostly Scottish. That is to say, a huge plurality of my DNA bits: 47 percent, back in 2023. (The year before that, it was 53 percent!) Now, I’m down to 35 percent, and the largest percentage of me is from “England & Northwestern Europe.” That’s jumped from 27 percent to 43 percent — again, in one year.
How do they define “England & Northwestern Europe?” Well, that’s fuzzy. They created that category several years back, and on their map it looked like England plus the tiniest bit of France. That tiny bit sort of equated to greater Calais. Here’s how they depicted it in 2022:
See how the line loops over from England to take in the Pale of Calais?
You see England, Calais and I suppose the Channel Islands. Which I suppose makes some sense, because Channel Islanders are British subjects, and England ruled the Calais area for a couple of centuries (they called it “the Pale of Calais“), and were bound to have left some of their DNA lying around. You know how men are. But since that’s the case, why not just call people possessing such DNA “English” — or at least X percentage English?
Of course — this being the Ancestry universe — the category doesn’t show up that way now. On the map at the top of this post, only England is green now. But if you click for more details, you get … well, it looks like this:
Wow, that’s a huge proportion of Western Europe, minus the Iberian Peninsula.
See how the larger, lighter green area takes in — well, most of what I think of as western Europe? That’s nice and vague, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, I’m no longer Scandinavian at all, even though last year I was 7 percent from Sweden or from Denmark, and 1 percent Norwegian. And suddenly, I’m practically not Irish at all — which would have been a great shock to my grandmother, being a Bradley and proud of that heritage. Finally, for the first time ever, Ancestry finds that I am 3 percent Dutch. And Belgium shows up, but I don’t see a specific percentage.
How could these things be? Well, here’s a wildly unscientific theory: This new estimate was issued in July of this year, even though I just noticed it a few days back.
Where was in July? Let’s see… For about four days, I was in England — London, Canterbury and Dover. Then, after crossing the Channel, we spent a couple of nights in… Calais. On the way north, we spent two days in Ghent. Eventually, we spent more than a week in… Amsterdam. During that last week, we took a day trip down to Bruges.
So. At the very time they were setting out a new vision of where my ancestors were from, I was physically in the places to which they decided to shift my “estimate.” So they appear to be basing the whole reassessment on where I, personally, was at the time.
Yes, I know that makes no kind of practical, cause-and-effect sense. But my theory has this going for it: It’s more fully understandable than the explanation Ancestry provides:
How do we come up with your estimate?
To figure out your ancestral regions, we compare your DNA to a reference panel made up of DNA from groups of people who have deep roots in one region. We look at 1,001 sections of your DNA and assign each section to the ancestral region it looks most like. Then we turn those results into the percentages you see in your estimate. Your genetic link to these regions can go back hundreds of years or even more.
To me, that seems to raise at least as many questions as it answers. I could enumerate some of them, but this post is already long enough.
Wherever numbers go up, they track our July itinerary.
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