Amber's Genealogy and Family History Blog: My Ancestry DNA Journey Part III: The Results

The results are in and . . . they're definitely not what I was expecting. Here's what happened. Tuesday morning I awoke to find an email in my inbox from Ancestry telling me that my DNA results were in. I clicked a couple of buttons and arrived at the following page:

As you can see, there is no Native American heritage in my ethnicity pie chart (which does not mean definitively that I have no Native American ancestry, but I'll discuss that more in a minute). The British Isles result, which includes England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, made sense because I have a lot of ancestors from those regions, particularly England. I was initially a little confused about the Southern European result until I realized that it included Portugal, which I have some confirmed and some unconfirmed lines that trace back to this country. The percentage seemed a bit higher than what I was expecting to find, but I could accept it.

There were, however, two things that baffled me about this result: the 18% Scandinavian result and the absence of results from other regions that I was expecting to see. I have not traced any ancestors to any of the Scandinavian countries and I have found ancestors born in countries not included in this chart, such as the Netherlands and Germany. My initial reaction was that Ancestry had to be wrong, that they must have swapped my DNA test with someone else's or messed up the test somehow or something like that. Then I started questioning my own genealogical research, scrutinizing the branch of my tree containing my Dutch ancestry, searching for mistakes. I began to worry that I had traced my family tree incorrectly.

While it is possible that my tree has errors, when I finally sat down and took the time to investigate the meaning of my DNA results, I learned that I did not have any reason to be panicking. Apparently, it's fairly common for people to get results different from what they were expecting using these DNA tests and, because of this, Ancestry put together an excellent video explaining what it means to get unexpected results. I'm including the video below in case you are interested. It's a bit long, but explains things really well, much better than I can in this short blog post, although I have tried to summarize the key ideas below.

One thing I learned from this video is that I've been thinking about ancestry in the wrong way, as I'm sure many of you have. We tend to ascribe to ourselves ethnic heritages based on only a few recent generations. For example, I have a second-great grandmother, Ella E. (Smith) Rice whose traceable maternal ancestors all were born in the Netherlands. Because of this I would like to claim that she is 50% Dutch and that in turn I am 1/32 Dutch, or about 3%. But what if some of her ancestors, the people with Dutch surnames but whose parents I have not traced back to their country of origin, what if one of them had a mother who was, say German? And what about her ancestors born in the Netherlands? For how many generations had they been in the Netherlands? Did any of them migrate from some other region in the past thousand years? Our DNA carries information about where our ancestors lived thousands of years ago, farther back than most of us can trace our trees, so it should not be surprising that we would find some unexpected ethnicities encoded in our genome.

Here's another example. Many people who have taken Ancestry's DNA test, such as me, have found that they had Scandinavian ancestry that they were not expecting to find. One probable reason why so many people are finding this result is because the Vikings invaded a number of countries, including Germany and England, intermixing their genetics with the native populace's. So you could have ancestors who lived in Germany for hundreds of years who descended in part from the Vikings. You're not going to be able to catch that by tracing backward from yourself, but the DNA test will catch this.

The other major reason why your results may not come out exactly as you would expect has to do with the way genetics work. Let's suppose that we have a person, Abigail, whose father was born in England, maternal grandmother was born in the Netherlands, and maternal grandfather was born in Wales. It would be tempting to say (assuming we did not know what we learned in the previous paragraphs) that Abigail is 50% English, 25% Dutch, and 25% Welsh, but genetics don't work exactly like that.

We receive 50% of our DNA from our mother and 50% from our father, but that does not mean that we get half of of every single trait our parents carry. So Abigail's mother, inheriting half of her DNA from each parent, would be genetically 50% Dutch and 50% Welsh. However, since Abigail is only inheriting part of her mother's DNA, she could receive all of the Dutch genetic traits and none of the Welsh genetic traits, all of the Welsh genetic traits and none of the Dutch, or some combination of both which may not be in equal proportions. While it is unlikely that Abigail would receive none of the Welsh DNA, as we look at Abigail's children, grandchildren, and so on down the line, it becomes increasingly likely that these individuals could receive none of the Welsh DNA traits. So this test does not say definitively that I have no Native American ancestry, as I initially assumed. I could still have Native American ancestors, but over time these genetic traits have disappeared. I could get a much stronger result if my father or grandmother took a DNA test, as they are much more closely linked to our purportedly Native American ancestor than I am.
After doing some searching on the internet I also found that the high percentages of Scandinavian ancestry in DNA results may be a flaw in Ancestry's test. The Legal Genealogist mentions it in this post and numerous people have blogged about it, comparing their AncestryDNA tests with other DNA tests they have taken. Ancestry is going to be releasing a major update to their DNA package here soon, so hopefully this will help correct any issues there are with their Scandinavian percentages. Their description does say they will provide "more refined ethnicity estimates," but their description of the update is very vague, so I'm not sure what exactly this entails. You can read about the update here.

That's the basic idea of why your DNA results may not match your expected results. Hopefully if you are planning on taking the test, this post can help you better understand what you'll be seeing. I know I wish I had taken more time to research the meaning of the results before taking the test so that I could have avoided panicking this morning over whether I had done my family tree completely wrong.
There is another really interesting feature of AncestryDNA, in which they compare your DNA results to other members to predict whether you are related. Since this is already a rather lengthy post, I'll discuss that feature in more detail in my next post.

Photo of the Day

Albert Weston Seybert with grandson Grant Weston Seibert

Christmas greeting from Albert Weston Seybert to Grant Weston Seibert

Albert Weston Seybert was born in June of 1846 in Pennsylvania to Cassandra (Stall) and Henry D. Seybert. In 1850 he resided in Salem, Luzerne, Pennsylvania with his parents and two siblings and in 1860 he was living in Salem with his parents and five siblings. In census records, he was listed as a farmer and as a laborer.

Albert married about 1867 another Salem resident, Lydia Alice Hosler, born in September of 1841 to Phoebe A. (Gensel) and Jacob Hosler. In 1870 Albert and Lydia were living in Briar Creek, Columbia, Pennsylvania with a young son at the home of Albert's maternal grandmother, Ann T. (---------) Stall. In 1880 they resided in Berwick, Colombia, Pennsylvania with four children. On April 19. 1885 Albert, Lydia, and their daughter Lizzie joined the United Methodist Church in Berwick. By 1900 Albert and Lydia were living in Centre Township, Colombia, Pennsylvania with three children.

Lydia died in 1904 and was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Berwick. In 1910 Albert was living in Center, Columbia, Pennsylvania with his youngest daughter. According to his son Ernest, Albert suffered paralysis during the summer of 1911, which left him unable to work. On November 5, 1911, Albert and his daughter Ella joined the Wesley United Methodist Church in Bloomsburg, Columbia, Pennsylvania. In the 1920 and 1930 censuses, Albert and his daughter Ella were living at 702 South Catherine Street in Bloomsburg, Columbia, Pennsylvania. Albert died in 1931 and was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Berwick, Columbia, Pennsylvania.

Albert and Lydia had several children:

1. Forrest E. Seybert, born in 1868 and died in 1877.

2. Elizabeth H. “Lizzie” Seybert, born in July of 1870.

3. Mary C. Seybert, born in 1872 and died in 1880.

4. Harry R. Seybert, born in 1875 and died in 1880.

5. Clark A. Seybert, born in 1878 and died in 1881.

6. Ellen M. “Ella” Seybert, born in January of 1882 and died in 1952. She married

sometime after 1930 but before 1940 William James VanDine, born February

10, 1880 to Charles Everett and Anna Louisa (Grittner) VanDine. Ella and

William lived at 702 Catherine Street in Bloomsburg, Columbia, Pennsylvania in the

house that Ella’s father had owned. William married (about 1906) and divorced

Agnes Ingertha (Strom), a Norwegian immigrant , born about March 7, 1887 and