At some point, I’ll be needing to change the page on this blog that reflects what ancestors I’m thought to have had and what ethnicities have or share. Although 23andMe and Ancestry have introduced me to great relatives, and answered some of the questions that I had going into testing — as well as caused even more questions to form — the ethnicities that it thought me to have were a bust in that both sites wildly guessed that I had a lot of English, northwestern heritage… and left it at that, not telling me anything else. As both… what do you call them?… continued to update over the years, none of these questions were answered. Not too long ago, I decided to feed my Ancestry test results into more specific sites, like MyHeritage (which was surprisingly more helpful) and, eventually, Genomelink. Not only did that answer the remainder of my questions, I felt the most confident in the results based on what I already knew. All of this is fascinating.

There are also some other things that I’ve found out by way of Ancestry tree (thanks, friend!) and Gemnoelink, which bounce off of eaxh other confirming what the other one says. It’s wild. 2023 is wild.

So 23andMe and Ancestry… are nowhere near as accurate as they need to be (or even are), given what I know about my family history. It seems like both sites take a guess assuming that I have substantial British DNA because what European doesn’t? (The answer is me. I am substantially Scandinavian and have less than five percent British DNA in all seriousness. I also know from what side of the family it came from, too.)

Getting back on track though… I did feed my raw data file from Ancestry to Genomelink, and I had it extrapolate my European DNA — not very much of that was a surprise, as it confirmed findings from ADNTRO and MyHeritage’s results — as well as trace Asian DNA that it said I had. The amount of it didn’t surprise me, but the origins of it did. I wouldn’t have guessed that I had Levantine or Turkic DNA. But then again, I have a fairly substantial amount of Iberian DNA, so the Levantine one shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. But it got me thinking because I have two cousins on one very specific side of the family who have that much trace Asian DNA. However, one of those cousins had Melanesian DNA, so it’s probably not too much of a stretch to assume that some of my trace Asian DNA might be Melanesian and I’m recording something like Turkic, Siberian, and South Indian DNA where he’s recording something else. It’s like how I have Balkan and Iberian DNA where one of my other cousins, way off on the other side of the family, has clearer Portuguese and Spanish DNA. I’m still glad — and thankful — that more and more strides are being made in genomics so people can learn more about their family history, especially people who know next to nothing about their family history for whatever reason. I am definitely going to keep studying this.