Anyone do the Ancestry Thing?

[Ninurta]

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 

There are several possibilities for that confusion.

The original Scotsmen were Picts, a Briton group. They went to Scotland during the Briton invasion of Britain, and settled there.

A possibility is that your ancestors were among the Irish that settled Scotland, strangely enough from the Irish tribe called "Scotti", and where the name Scotland came from. They crossed from Northern Ireland and settled on the coast of Scotland, and over the centuries spread out from there displacing or assimilating the Picts.

Yet another possibility is that some of your relatives were among the Scots-Irish, displaced from Scotland by the English and resettled on the Ulster Plantations. If they left their DNA there, then it would cause a hit in your own. The bulk of them left Northern Ireland after about 3 generations or so, and came to America and immediately ran into the wilderness to settle as far away from the English as they could get. A lot pf Appalachians, myself included, can trace part of their ancestry back to them.

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