Please help me interpret my results

[jlusk99]

I got my DNA results a couple months ago and have been playing with Gedmatch. I recently got my father's as well and a maternal uncle's is currently processing (mother is passed away).

My known genealogy is as follows:

Father-
Grandfather is overwhelmingly Scottish/Scots-Irish and English (family has been in America for hundreds of years, coming in on the East Coast and migrating to the South, most in Mississippi)
Grandmother's dad had Spanish surname from Canary Island ancestor to Louisiana, was pretty much 100% Louisiana French Creole and Spanish Creole. Grandmother's mother had grandfather migrating from Germany, and a half French/half Scots-Irish grandmother

Mother-
Grandfather seems to be primarily Scottish/English, although there is an ancestor by the name of Boon(e) who is suspected of being an Indian or possibly mixed African/Indian that tried to 'pass' as European.
Grandmother also on paper appears to be Scottish/English with some French, a distant Creek Indian ancestor, and also some Swedish. Mother's father had English surname but there is some mystery in this line and some of the descendants had olive complexion and dark curly hair.

So based on my known ancestry I would expect to show as primarily English/Scottish with a significant French component and dashes of German, Spanish, Swedish, and trace Indian.

My first AncestryDNA came back as 32% Scandinavian, 31% Southern European, 23% Central European, and trace amounts of East European and others.
The Ancestry update shows 39% Great Britain, 12% Iberian, 12% Irish, 10% Scandinavia, 9% Europe West, 9% Italy, 6% Finn, with trace European Jew and Southeast African Bantu.

When I run the different Gedmatch tests, seems like everyone gives me a different result. Some show me as French, some as English, some as German. Which one is the most reliable?

[AJL]

It sounds like all the analyses are homing in on your correct mix, following your paper trail -- the calculators are only disagreeing over which population you are closest to. Since you come primarily from several neighbouring populations, this is to be expected. You might enjoy running the same calculators in mixed mode, which could be slightly more accurate.

AncestryDNA v1 overreported Scandinavian, apparently; the newer version might be better but I am not convinced it as good as the various Oracles.

My mother's ancestry and that of most of her cousins is very similar to yours (common Caucasian-American mix). She ends up as primarily Caucasian American (Utah Mormons), English, Welsh, French, Cornish, Danish, German, Belgian, or Dutch, depending on the calculators and constraints, while my aunt (her sister) ends up consistently Irish, Scottish, or English. That should tell you something about the dependability of inheritance, the potential ethnic diversity within a family, as well as the limits of the calculators.

[jlusk99]

Thanks for replying AJL.

The thing that really threw me for a loop -- my dad's side is where is have the known Spanish and French ancestry, yet, my results are showing higher Mediterranean numbers than he is. From what I know of my mother's ancestry, there are only small amounts of French and no known Spanish. Yet on the Ancestry.com admixture I show as 12% Iberian and my dad only shows as 2%. Unfortunately my mother is deceased, but I have recruited her brother and his test is processing now. Maybe there is some unexpected Spanish that will show up there that we weren't aware of. My maternal great grandfather had the English surname Livings, but we are unable to find the parentage of his grandfather. There was a Livings family in the area of Alabama that he came from but we can't figure out how he fit into that family. The patriarch of the family seemed too old to be his father and his sons seemed too young to be his father. Several of his descendants, including my grandmother, had an olive complexion with very thick dark curly black hair. My grandmother's aunt almost looked like she could have passed as a Latino. Perhaps this Livings was actually a Spaniard adopted into that family? Might never know the answer to that question.

I have read that people of primarily British descent will show significant Iberian and Italian results on the Eurogenes K36 test, but what is the "normal" number to be expected? Seems like my number is higher than most other people of similar ancestry that have shared their results.

My K36 results are=
North Sea - 19.43%
Iberian - 19.06%
Italian - 12.78%
C. European - 9.99%
N. Atlantic - 9.48%
Fennoscandian - 7.34%
E. Central European - 6.80%
French - 6.69%
Basque - 3.51%
West Med - 1.74%
S. Central Asia - 1.37%
and trace others all under 1%

Don't understand how 2 of my top three are Iberian and Italian, when I have only a small known Iberian ancestry and no known Italian. Is my French showing as Iberian/Italian? Even if that's the case, based on known genealogy I expect at most to be 15% or stretching it 20% French, but my combined "Mediterranean" ancestry is quite high-- 43.78% if you combine Iberian, Italian, French, West Med, and Basque. Yet my father's combined 'Med' is less than mine at 41.95%. I just don't understand how that's possible when you would expect him to have twice the amount of Mediterranean blood since he is one generation closer to the French/Spanish ancestor. My only conclusion is that my mother must have unexpected Mediterranean ancestry we didn't know about, or I just happened to inherit all of the Mediterranean genes when my DNA was mixed. Does what I'm trying to say make sense?

Here is my dad's K36:

North Sea - 19.33
Iberian - 17.16
North Atlantic - 13.67
Italian - 13.1
French - 8.58
E. Central European - 8.34
Fennoscandian - 7.79
Basque - 2.81
East European - 1.29
and trace others all below 1%

Interesting that my dad's North Atlantic is significantly higher than mine. Maybe that's where his French numbers are showing up? Regardless, I find this fascinating and it's amazing we have such tools at our disposal, that will most likely continue to improve.

Would be interested to see what others of mostly colonial British Isles descent with a dash of Louisiana Creole would show up as.