A year ago at Christmas I received a DNA test kid to determine my heritage.
We were told by my parents that both my Grandmothers had come from Germany and my Grandfathers had both come from Ireland.
The tests showed no German (although both grandmothers themselves had told me Germany). As it turns out mostly Irish, Welsh, and Scandinavian. My one grandmother had told me the borders had changed back and forth between Germany and Poland so it could what ever you chose to say you were. My grandfathers both have been able to be traced back to Ireland in the 1850's. So why no German?

"Germany" was a loose collection of different states for a very long time. It all comes down to how "German" is defined and at what point your ancestors made their way to Germany.

Christmas of 2018 I received one of those kits. Collected specimen, sent it in. Lots of Western European to include Scots-Irish (my ancestral grandfathers to America were from Bavaria at that time, and France) which is reflective of my home area but no mention of Native American which the French ancestor married (and perhaps two others). About the time he married, someone from Scandinavia entered the picture...I'd say unless you spend a few more bucks, there's a lot of error involved.

There was a set of triplets that took a couple of the at home DNA tests. There were differences between them and between the tests.

Seems how the DNA sample is taken and how it’s interested can give different results. The collection of DNA samples that the company uses also can change the results.

“ If there’s any major takeaway from seeing the Dahm Triplets’ at-home DNA test kit results, it should be an understanding that modern DNA testing isn’t 100 percent spot on when it comes to determining a person's ethnicity or ancestry.”

https://yourdna.com/dahm-triplets-test/

And family stories can also be in error.

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Originally posted by jhe888:
And family stories can also be in error.

Yes. There was a story not too long ago about some siblings (sisters?) who discovered through DNA testing that the family history of who was their biological father wasn't true.

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Originally posted by sigfreund:
who discovered through DNA testing that the family history of who was their biological father wasn't true.

Who's your daddy?

A while back there was a rape in an English city. The police decided that absent any rights, they'd just do a DNA test on every male. Notice no women's groups protested, it wasn't their fight. And low and behold, it was discovered that a fairly constant 20%, give or take, didn't have the daddy they had thought was theirs. Mommy's play around, too.

So the accuracy of the tests need to be viewed as either not absolute, or scientifically correct, but not politically. Mommy ain't sayin' nothin'.

wife and I did the Ancestry.com kit a couple years ago,

I knew my heritage was English,
but my mother told me we were from Northern England,


ancestry says no, London and Southern England,

found out that my paternal ancestor came over from London in 1609,, and his grandfather was from the Winchester area, then the trail drops,


current Ancestory shows
62% English
27% or so Scots Irish,
some Norway\Scandinavian,
some Central Europe (Germany included in this area)
and less than 1% Congo,,,


wife was told she was Irish, thru and thru,

her Scots Irish percentage is less than mine,

she is mostly Central Europe (Germany\Austria etc)

I know that my one grandmother used to travel to Germany to visit relatives. Her relatives here in the U.S. Had German Surnames. My father went to a grade school where the nuns only spoke in German.

Mine was so accurate it narrowed me down to the town in Sweden my ancestors were from. And according to our family's stories it's spot on.

Family lore, Ancetry dot com, dna, and one other ancestry site all agree to the letter about me. Dna has even pointed out of my known relatives

I was told that there was some French in my background by my mother when she was alive. While I have not taken a DNA test through Ancestry and Family Search I have found that my great grandfather actually came from Belgium.

I've found out many details by searching online. Including a family mystery. 1960 a elderly lady came to visit, my aunts were all tense, my great grandmother spoke to this mystery lady referred to as an aunt.

I found out that she was not an aunt. She was my great grandmother's step mother, I suppose I can refer to her as my step great great grandmother.

How's that for something? I was eight at the time. She was only about fifteen years older than my great grandmother, this lady was in her 80's.

Ancestry.com has e-mailed me revised results twice. The major countries (Germany, Scotland-Ireland and England) have changed some, but still in the same order.

When I got the first results I was 48% German. I researched it and found that the average German today is only 47% German.

I've done a lot of genealogy work over the years, had my own DNA tested and had other clients tested to find relatives and trace trees. The accuracy of DNA is defined by the contributing pool so as time goes by and more get tested the accuracy increases hence the changing percentages in Ancestry results.

The one consistent thing I run into is family lore is often embellished so it's not surprising that DNA results are not what one was led to believe.

DNA testing is very accurate when performed correctly, however when it comes to genealogy it’s simply entertainment.

Prior to the story of someone sending in his Labrador Retriever's DNA, the results of which indicated that "the person" was of significant Greek heritage, I recommended to a friend that we trap a squirrel and send in its DNA and see what happens. It's a very simple economic analysis for someone who generates and reviews sequencing data, that the firms selling DNA kits wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a squirrel and a human based on the price of the test from the likes of 23andme and Ancesry.com.

Kit prices indicate they're probably only performing the bare minimum - a single pass on an Illumina MiSeq, the most common long-read sequencer. Single pass error rates sit around 3% and there's about that much difference between a squirrel's DNA and our own. Contemplate that for a sec... approximately 3% DNA difference between you and a nut-eating tree rat.

The Sequencing Entertainment (SeqEnt) companies as I call them, didn't have bioinformatic safeguards in place to insure human vs other animal, which is pathetic, when the former story broke. Apparently they can cross reference a SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) hit with outside database requests (e.g. FBI rape data), in which case they probably perform multiple sequencing passes on a sample to insure the accuracy of the results - prior to providing the intel to a requesting agency. No doubt at the agency's cost.

Oh and before you tell me that the results must be accurate, otherwise how do the SeqEnt sell the data to Biopharma? It comes down to gross population genomic statistics and other geo-regional, gender and age difference data vs. correlative disease statistics. The data isn't granular enough for biopharma but it might provide research impetus to investigate differences in the patterns that are generated.

Bottom line - the sequencing might be statistically sufficient to compare against regional public genomic datasets, which shift over time, to provide some entertainment value as to one's former ethnic background but I wouldn't put much stake in it beyond “oh look, GMa must have been tellin’ the truth.” In the meantime, my buddy updated me a couple weeks ago that he discovered that his FIL traps squirrels regularly. Now which Sequencing Entertainment company should we use...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Dakor,

My younger brother did one of these and it was as expected, as we already knew about 75% through genealogy research. Having said that, back during the OJ murder trial, it came out that the DNA standard they used to determine the probability of two African American males sharing the same DNA was based on a sample of 600 individuals from Detroit! If that had been a random sample across the entire USA, it still would have been too low by a couple of orders of magnitude. It couldn't have been a representative sample, due to the geographical limitation. I was shocked when this wasn't even mentioned by yhe defense during the trial, or the subsequent civil trial. Maybe theat was an outlier and the whole DNA testing industry has corrected it in the intervening years, but I doubt it.

My DNA test matches very closely what our genealogy research came up with. So that speaks to a good level of accuracy, at least regarding Northern European origins.

My sister's DNA test showed the same origins as mine but with slightly different percentages - which made me ask how that could happen. And the answer is, siblings can have small differences in percentages based on how much of each parents DNA went into their actual makeup. The only siblings with exactly the same percentages are identical twins.

But as to German background: if you track back through the Census records, or to the Ellis Island records, or look at the relevant ship arrival records, you often can find a notation of where people came from. "Germany" only became a unified country in 1871, although the Prussians had been adding German principalities, kingdoms, and duchies to Prussian control before that. German people who came to the U.S. prior to 1871 probably had documents that showed a location of origin other than "Germany," or may have used the "old" name for their region even after Germany was "unified" in 1871.

My paternal Grandfather arrived in New York in 1908 and his entry on the ship manifest says "Prussia," as do many others on the SS Crown Prince Cecilia. He was from what is now called Lower Saxony, but was called Oldenburg at the time he left, near the City-State of Bremen -- near the North Sea coast fairly close to the Netherlands. That area had been incorporated into Prussia around 1867, but by 1908 his country of origin presumably should have been listed as "Germany."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...ia/File%3Cimg%20src=

Close, but Ancestry has changed their results to be more and more generalized. I can trace most of my ancestors to northern UK, Scotland and some ulster ScotchIrish, with a healthy chunk of German. Pretty much 80/20 for those regions. Ancestry basically puts a big blob over that entire area now. Surprisingly there was some Scandinavian that I can’t account for. Maybe 4% but I suspect that’s common for the region.

I did it, it was spot on for me. I know this as a uncle did a painstaking genealogy family tree, pre-personal computer and way before these tests were available.

When I did the test I learned that this uncle was born out of wedlock to my great aunt. This was a pretty big deal back then. My uncles father was Sicilian and not Jewish, again, a pretty big deal back then.

Over the years here, I have seen those who refuse to accept wikipedia as a source of information because it is a "community/collaborative" effort. For those quick to latch on to Ancestry.com, do you understand it is the same scenario?

In my opinion, Ancestry.com would be a good source to get hints from or data that is verifiable by other sources.

I have seen flaws in the LDS (Mormon) rolls too.

Unless you implicitly trust the data source, you would so well to verify the data.