ROOTS & BRANCHES

I think some of my friends in the larger genealogical community do the virtual equivalent of camping out on the doorstep when waiting for AncestryDNA or MyHeritage (or whichever other services they’ve tested at) release new ethnicity percentages.

I’m not one of those people, which is probably one of the reasons I’m only writing about my changes a month or so after they occurred.

When my first Ancestry results posted a couple of years ago, it gave me 52 percent “England, Wales and Northwestern Europe,” 44 percent “Germanic Europe,” and smidgens of French (3 percent) and European Jewish (2 percent).

This initially was disconcerting since my paper trail would imply 99 percent German and maybe just a smidgen of British (of course, there is the possibility that some of that paper trail isn’t consistent with my actual genetic ancestry … but we’ll ponder that some other day).

But in talking through these results with DNA experts such as Your DNA Guide Diahan Southard, I was advised that while continent-level ethnicity percentages are fairly accurate, there is still a lot of variance at more granular levels.

In terms of my lineage, there’s a fogginess created by the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain—introducing the blood of Germanic tribes—at the close of the Roman Empire that makes delineating “British” from “German” DNA difficult.

Then my ethnicity percentages changed (or as Ancestry calls it, my “DNA Story”).

Germanic Europe was boosted to 54 percent. What had been “England, Wales and Northwestern Europe” was now broken down into 33 percent from “England and Northwestern Europe” and 8 percent just Wales.

My “smidge” of European Jewish (1 percent) remained but now 3 percent amounts from Scotland and Norway entered the mix. Undoubtedly one of my friends from college will be interested that I now qualify for Viking-hood, “kind of, sort of.”

More interesting to me, on the other hand, are what Ancestry calls “Genetic Communities” in America and it has assigned me to two of them: “Early Pennsylvania Settlers” and “Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, Northern West Virginia & Maryland Settlers.”

The former makes perfect sense since all but one couple in my paper trail were in America before the 19^th century. The latter one will take a little more time to marinate upon since as far as I know none of my ancestors got any further west than Lebanon County, Pennsylvania (When I click this community it shows a spot well west of the Susquehanna River and references U.S. Censuses that mention by grandmother Dora Etchberger Beidler, who I’m not sure whether she even ever visited spots that far west!).

But this may be in part to me not knowing enough about how Ancestry determines these “Gentic Communities.”

Sounds like a project to delve into this winter!