With the new job, I decided to splurge on a genetic test from Ancestry.com, hoping to see if it matched me up with anyone. As a bonus, they guess what your ethnic ancestry is from the results.
I don’t actually trust those ethic results much, but they still didn’t surprise me to any great degree:
| Region | Approximate amount | |
| North Africa | < 1% | |
| Scandinavia | 39% | |
| Europe West | 24% | |
| Ireland | 21% | |
| Europe East | 4% | |
| Great Britain | 3% | |
| Iberian Peninsula | 2% | |
| European Jewish | 2% | |
| Finland/Northwest Russia | 2% | |
| Italy/Greece | < 1% | |
| Caucasus | < 1% |
In map form:
I’m not surprised at all that it predicts my ethnicity is from Scandinavia, Western Europe and Ireland. That’s pretty much what my genealogy says. However, it has a higher percentage of Irish and lower percentage of Western European than my genealogy indicates.
Now, either my genealogy work is wrong, their estimates are imprecise, or the genetic mix of a large portion of my Irish and Western European ancestors is too diverse to accurately classify. Barring an instance of the milkman being my ancestor instead of a documented parent or an unknown adoption, I’m reasonably certain of my tree out to my third great grandparents’ generation. There’s always a possibility of someone schtupping someone they weren’t married to though. I suspect the discrepancy is a combination of items 2 and 3. The 25% of my ancestry that is Swedish can be traced back hundreds of years, and it’s all Swedish. But the Irish, German, and Danish? Well, that could easily be pretty mixed ethnically.
But this analysis isn’t why I took the test. I’ll write about genetically matching people in my family tree in another post. That was far more useful.