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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Although the Ancestry.com page states July update, the new “estimates” came out earlier this month. I follow a Reddit board where many people are surprised and/or disappointed in the new update.
My previous makeup really pinpointed an area where I know for certain my folks lived. Now that has been increased to show 9 counties in Central Europe. Whatever.
Oh, and I picked up another origin: Iceland. Other people on Reddit also gained Iceland as an origin. Can’t wait for the next update.
Thanks for responding and sharing, Doug!
I know I bore people to death with this genealogy stuff, but I write these anyway, largely for myself and my descendants. For instance, if I hadn’t written about the 2022 estimate and included an image, I wouldn’t have been able to go back and track what has happened. Maybe there’s a place to look up the old ones on Ancestry, but I haven’t found it.
And I find these wild swings interesting. If I had more readers like you who are into Ancestry, some of them might find it interesting, too…
A few weeks ago I presented to my local genealogy chapter information on using DNA (shared matches, mostly) to fill in gaps on a family tree. To me it was very interesting. Took me 8 years to find a set of great great grandparents’ origins. It was a needle in the haystack find. Looking over the room as I was presenting, one guy was literally sleeping. Others had a vacant stare. When I spoke to one of the people who enjoyed my presentation, he told me just shrug it off, telling me others just want to hear Civil War stories.