These are recent screenshots of my ancestry composition as… estimated by 23andMe, or however you would word that. Of course, the only thing that I omitted from the screenshot was my full name, which would have shown up to the left of the 100% percentage on both screenshots. In hindsight, given that my full name can be found on our Amazon wish list if anyone purchases anything off of it, and the link can be found on the right side of my blog… maybe I didn’t need to crop it out, but since it’s a picture that can theoretically be saved to someone’s computer, I don’t exactly mind having done so. At any rate, all of these ancestry kits seem to say something completely different, which will illustrate itself when I post the screenshot that I have of my Ancestry results. I thought that those would be a lot more varied, as I’ve seen friends’ results where they have a lot of different percentages broken down and a lot more detail… and then you have mine, which I will eventually be getting to, which is a lot more boring and dull in comparison. At least my 23andMe is more interesting, even though more than half of my ancestry starts with “Broadly” and doesn’t get more specific…

For a little while, when I was checking my “DNA Story” in Ancestry, it had my ancestral computations as:
“AngloSaxon”
“Celtic”
and “German”.

Just those things. That amused me to bits. I’m not even going to lie.

I thought that they were going to keep things that way, but when I went to check on them the next morning to see if they were going to continue to name things… that way, everything was back to the way it had been. (“England, Wales & Northwestern Europe”, “Ireland & Scotland”, and “Germanic Europe” for me. I wish my DNA Story was a bit more interesting given what I’ve seen other people’s Ancestry results to have been…)

I like to periodically check my computations in both 23andMe and Ancestry to see if anything has changed, because they have been known to change as more research is done as to where genes are most likely to have come from. And it’s still interesting to note that Ancestry thinks that I am a quarter Irish and Scottish, whereas 23andMe is convinced that quarter is Germanic. Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my DNA is getting into a fistfight as to where this portion of my ancestry actually comes from, and I stay living for finding out where that portion of my ancestry actually comes from, because it’s amusing to study this, and it’s just as amusing to note the discrepancies between 23andMe and Ancestry. I am that kind of person…

When I got my initial results in, 0.10% of my DNA had been read as broadly northern East African, but an update took that away… without changing any of my percentages, so my total percentages only came to 99.9% no matter how you did the math. I wondered about this for awhile, but one of their most recent updates actually gave this 0.10% back to me, although that portion of my DNA is currently allocated to the “Unassigned” section. With any luck, as they continue to update their algorithm and their systems, I will find out what portion of my ancestry that DNA is allocated to, especially since it seems like a comparatively small amount. But it had amused me for awhile that my ancestral composition did not add up to 100% like it was… supposed to, especially since so many of my DNA matches did have their ancestral compositions add up to 100% (although some of theirs, like mine, did not, and that this was to varying degrees), and I wanted to know why this was. But having watched them change what portions of my DNA have been assigned where over the course of their several updates, at least I have an idea where to expect them to assign this DNA at some point whenever it does get assigned, or where it might most reasonably be expected to come from…

This genealogy stuff is kind of wild, especially since I have the two unknown family members that I do.

According to 23andMe, I am:
56.9% British and Irish
27.5% German
1.7% Scandinavian
10.5% Broadly Northwestern European
2.2% Southern European (this was formerly Portuguese/Spanish)
1.1% Broadly European
(and before this, 0.10% Broadly Northern East African, where’d that go?)

According to Ancestry, I am:
71% from England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe
25% from Ireland and Scotland
4% from Germany

That’s quite a stretch between the two of them.

Honestly, I think my Germanic DNA and my Irish DNA are having a fistfight.

I didn’t expect them to be so vastly different in terms of feedback, but here we are, I suppose!