I’ve been tinkering around in GEDmatch because I’ve heard a lot of good things about using the website, even if it’s not always the easiest to understand. It is technical, so I’m going to need to break it down here.

In addition, I’ve been tinkering around with Genomelink, and I’m really interested with the results that they’ve given my 23andMe and Ancestry files (I always use the Ancestry ones for this sort of thing so that the same set of DNA is measured and quantified). I’ll post that picture in a bit, and some of the more detailed pictures describing my European heritage… I just don’t want to saturate my blog with a whole lot of screenshots and posts about those screenshots, but I do want to incorporate my findings in some way. Almost all of it corroborates what I’ve learned from previous tests, but certain trace DNA is more consistently coming up on these tests that was not and probably would not come up on Ancestry and 23andMe because those testing companies have become some of the least accurate that I have had the… pleasure of doing business with. As much as I like their family-finding features, their ethnicity estimates have not been accurate when it comes to me at all, and they become increasingly less accurate with each subsequent update and I hate it.

This has confirmed some things for me, and it’s revealed some others that… aren’t too surprising given what I know about my ethnicity and family history. I’ll be extrapolating more on those in subsequent posts as I have the time to do so. I’ve gotten better at reading the results that most of these tests give me by doing research that I hope to share here, even though most of this is still a work in progress (and might always be).

I feel like they are getting less and less accurate with me. ADNTROS and MyHeritage nail it, though.

The amount of German DNA that this is reporting really surprises me, because just about every test I’ve done says that I either have very little German DNA or none. Almost all tests have reported that I am either a third or just under halfway Celtic (Irish, Scottish and Welsh). The fact that this says that I have no British DNA does not surprise me at all since three recent tests where I have uploaded my DNA have reported that. I am predominantly Scandinavian as it turns out, and I’m cool with that. The French DNA that this reports back is not that surprising, as early on I ran my DNA through GEDmatch and it reported back with trace DNA that I had initially discarded. I know that I have Balkan and Greek DNA, although this does not report back on my Italian DNA the same way that GEDmatch enthusiastically has. And the eastern European DNA does not even surprise me, because GEDmatch consistently reported back on low levels of Romanian DNA.

So here we are, I suppose. At some point I’ll update the “More About Me” page with some of this.

Facebook suggested this website enough to me that I decided to upload my Ancestry DNA to it and give it a try. So far, it hasn’t told me anything that I didn’t already know or haven’t already seen on other tests, which is good. The only surprising bit is the fact that it did not pick up any Irish DNA, and it reported west German DNA when 23andMe isn’t sure if I’m French, German, or both, and Ancestry initially had me pegged at 2% German that it walked back on the next update. Given what I do know of my family history though, I am inclined to say that I am probably not as German as 23andMe thinks I am, or this website might think I am.