Anyone do the Ancestry Thing?

[CelticBanshee3]

As always, you're a wealth of information.  My parents used the Ancestry DNA kit my sister got them for Christmas.  Like you said, they're still getting more and more accurate results by testing a wider base.  What confused me was that the majority, 40% of my mother's DNA was pegged as Scotland, with a possibility of north Ireland, Inishowen in particular.  It makes me wonder, was my great grandmother a Scot who lived in Ireland?  Or is the DNA testing not extensive enough yet, so they lump Scotland and Northern Ireland together?  How different is Irish DNA from Scottish DNA?  (Sorry Gordi).  I thought it was funny seeing a mix of Norwegian, Swedish, and English.  I guess one of my ancestors got it on with a viking.  I always knew I had some berserker blood in me 

I just thought of another possibility to explain this confusion.

The DNA testing at the ancestral population level  matches you to the closest populations to your DNA that is in their database, and some times, the results are inaccurate because the closest population they have isn't exactly the right one, just close due to migrations and whatnot. For example, in the early days, my Indian DNA showed up in one test as "North Asian", because that is where at least some of the Indian populations migrated to America from in the long ago, and their DNA is similar to DNA from Siberia and the Altai Mountains. So in that case where they had no Indian DNA in their database, the analysis kicked out the closest match to it that they did have in the database, which was "North Asian".

Another test showed my Indian DNA as "Mayan" because Mayans were the only Indians they had in their database, so that is how it identified my Indian DNA. In yet another, it showed up as "Pima" as I recall, because Pima DNA was the only Indian DNA in that database. So that is at least 3 different identifications for the exact same bits of DNA.

There is a program called "DIY Dodecad" that will allow you to run your raw DNA file against several different datasets, and it's interesting to see how the ancestry of the same DNA can appear to change based upon the reference populations it is tested against.

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