Ancestry’s DNA database is absolutely fascinating

Because I’m a history nerd, I did the Ancestry.com DNA test a year ago. My results were that I was:

34% Southern European

21% Eastern European

17% Finnish/Volga/Ural

13% British Isles

8% Scandanavian

7% Central European

As you can see some of those are really broad groups that encompass a whole lot of area. At the time Ancestry said that as they did more work, analysis, and added more people to the database they would be able to become more and more accurate, and would be able to break down genetic populations with increasing accuracy.

They just sent me the tightened up results, where each of those above categories has been broken down into smaller sub groups. This is absolutely fascinating stuff.

Africa 3%



Africa North 3%





Europe 96%



Europe East 27%




Iberian Peninsula 20%




Great Britain 18%




Europe West 16%




Ireland 8%




Finland/Northwest Russia 3%




Italy/Greece 2%




Scandinavia 1%




European Jewish 1%





West Asia< 1%

Trace Regions< 1%

Edit to add, the trace group here is Middle East. Didn’t open that up before cutting and pasting.

So in a year their database went from differentiating 6 population groups to 11. At this rate in a few years they’ll be able to tell you which valley your ancestors came from.

As a retired number cruncher, I’m curious what happened with their British Isles/Scandinavia numbers from the last time around to this time. Apparently my Vikings were actually Irishmen all along. :)

The biggest change was the very broad southern European breaking up into smaller categories, mostly Iberian can now be separated from western European. So actual Iberian, I’m only 20%. Which is funny, since culturally that’s the one that won, what with my last name and how I grew up. (Yeah, we never talked about mom’s family, because she was an Okie!, which is funny since she’d never been to Oklahoma in her life, but if you weren’t Portuguese or Mexican in the San Joaquin Valley, you were considered an Okie).

The North African makes sense. Even on the last go around the note on the Iberians was that they were usually around 10% North African, but they didn’t have a clear break down of that yet.

The 1% European Jewish is interesting, since as far as we can tell that’s from the same branch of the family tree as the big Europe East, so they were genetically Polish but practicing Jews. Fascinating stuff.

I’ll be really curious to see what these results look like in a few years.

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Sort of related, but my wife has started researching my family history. It is a Mormon thing, and hers is already done about as far back as can reasonably be achieved. She’s not had much luck on my dad’s side yet finding people, but surprisingly has on my mom’s. She’s discovered that one of my mom’s ancestors was named Lafayette Best, and I’m sorry, that’s like a really cool name, and I’m also descended from some Baldwins from Mississippi. I can only hope that means I’m related to Adam and not Alec. :)