The folks at the 23andMe subforum told me to crosspost this here, and so I'll do so!
-----
I've been trying to uncover the Slavic, maternal half of my roots. Previously, I was under the impression that I was half Polish, and that side of my family of origin was too, but after submitting my spit sample to 23andMe it's unclear just how much of my roots are actually Polish and how much is actually some other Slavic (or even potentially some other non-Slavic!) ethnic group that Poland went in and Polonized, since political borders have fluctuated rather vigorously in the regions from which I have records of known ancestors' birth/residence. I'm a PhD student in molecular bio with a specialty in computational genetics so I understand the limitations of this sort of testing very well and have read about the differences between 23andMe and GEDMatch's references and computation, but my specialty is decidedly not in human genetics or ancestral admixture.
---------------------
Genetic information:
1) 23andMe has found some real interesting things. At the default (50%) confidence level, I am listed as 47.4% Eastern European, with Poland highlighted (5 dots under the 'scientific details' section) and Ukraine also somewhat (2 'dots'), as well as 1.3% Balkan (basically the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Greece). At the 60% confidence level, 23andMe is still confident that I am 45.1% Eastern European and 0.3% Balkan. At 70%, this goes down to 42.4% EE and the Balkan ancestry disappears. At 80%, it is 36.7%, and at 90%, it is 27.5%. It is also confident up to the 80% confidence level that 0.1% of my genome is broadly East Asian, and before 23andMe updated everyone's results, it assigned this to Japanese ancestry, but it no longer does (the most prevalent result for this I get on GEDmatch calculators is Siberian/Altaic).
2) When I chucked my raw data through the admixture calculators at GEDmatch.com and sent it into DNA.land just for giggles, I got some odd mixed results: not actually many Polish hits, especially from the calculators that actually HAD Polish samples. I actually mostly got hits from four countries: Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.
- DNA.land (kind of cruddy and doesn't have Polish pops) thinks my Slavic ancestry is a mixture of Belarusian, Lithuanian, Russian, and Ukrainian (and for some reason it thinks I've got a chunk of Uralic in there - Mordovian, Estonian, and Finnish pop up)
All these GEDmatch calculators have Polish populations (using the 4-ancestors tool, since my grandparents hail from four different locations in Europe: British Isles, Germany, northeastern Poland in Podlaskie/Warmian-Masurian voivodeships near Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia/Kaliningrad, and southeastern Poland near the border with Ukraine. I omitted results from Western Europe because that's my paternal ancestry):
- Eurogenes K13 thinks I'm Lithuanian, Belarusian, Finnish, Estonian, and Russian (the Uralic COULD be actually Slavic, because there are Slavic populations in Finland and Estonia)
- Eurogenes EUtest v2 K15 thinks I'm Ukrainian (specifically, the Ukrainians around Lviv, which isn't entirely insensible given the Galician ancestry)
- Eurogenes EUtest thinks I'm Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Northwest Russian, and Belarusian
- MDLP World-22 thinks I'm a lot more Belarusian, Lithuanian, Russian, and Ukrainian than Polish, though it recognizes the Polish apparently
- MDLP K23b thinks I'm West/South Belarusian, Kashubian (Polish, I know), Lithuanian, generic Baltic, Latvian, and Russian
- MDLP K16 Modern thinks I'm Latvian, Belarusian (particularly from around Gomel, which is weird because that's Eastern Belarus), and Lithuanian, and maybe slightly concedes that I'm part Polish (with a particular focus on the Sorbs, which are genetically closest to the Poles and Czechs).
- Dodecad K12b really, really thinks I'm Belarusian (18/20), with a smattering of Lithuanian (2/20)
I computed the weighted average distance for each of the Slavic populations that came up in 4-ancestors mode on the GEDmatch calculators by taking the average of each of the distances cited (dividing by two when it came up twice or three when it came up three times) and dividing the average by the number of times it came up out of 20 in the 20-iteration list, then compared how often a given population came up across them and took the average of those. The weighted averages:
Eurogenes K13: LITHUANIA 0.1656193077, BELARUS 0.5298225, ESTONIA 0.20566821, FINLAND 1.06126325, RUSSIA (SMOLENSK) 2.161569
Eurogenes EUtest: LITHUANIA 0.4197421983, UKRAINE 2.25824675, NORTHWEST RUSSIA 1.157080438, BELARUS 1.550440111
MDLP World: LITHUANIA 0.1422681975, LATVIA 0.3163514375, POLAND 0.2780850938, RUSSIA (mostly Russian South but one Russian Center) 0.324255, ESTONIA 1.316871
MDLP World-22: BELARUS 0.14889506, LITHUANIA 0.16863503, POLAND 0.4655572222, RUSSIA 0.2805137778, UKRAINE 0.5726013333
Dodecad K12b: BELARUS 0.03279360802, LITHUANIA 0.307153
puntDNAL K15: LITHUANIA 0.0922446108, BELARUS 0.5040627188, POLAND 0.2942503047
Rank-ordering the populations by their incidence and rank in these results, I get from most to least Lithuania -> Belarus -> Russia -> Poland -> Ukraine.
Towns and surnames in question:
1) On one side of the Slavic part of my ancestry...
- I have actual living relatives in Pisz, in northeastern Poland (north of Lomza, northwest of Bialystok)
- I am pretty sure one of my great-grandfathers was from Bialystok
- I've heard Lomza tossed around a few times
- The surname 'Sielawa' is found pretty heavily on this side, and I am aware it:
- - clusters mostly in the east of the country in Podlaskie Voivodeship and a bit in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship (it's the Polish word for the vendace, Coregonus alba, a kind of European whitefish that is found in the area. c.f. Belarusian 'cялява' and Lithuanian 'seliava'). It is found mostly in Kolno, Borkowo, Lomza, Pisz, Szczuczyn, and Bialystok.
- - is a surname associated with the szlachta (most famous bearers: Atanas "Anton" Sielawa/Selyava/Seliava, metropolitan of Kiev/Russia/Ruthenia in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and Stanislaw Sielawa, indicted but cleared in the Jedwabne pogrom in WWII),
- - it is a relatively uncommon surname (approximately 600 people in Poland with it, and a population in the United States clustered around NY/MI/MA/PA), so I'm probably related to everyone bearing the surname.
- - I have seen one internet source associating Sielawa with Lithuanian origins, and another one associating it with Belarusian origins, but this is confusing. Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania are the only European countries in which versions of this surname exist.
- Others: Prusinowski (I'm aware this refers to Prussia), Duda (I'm aware this is common)
2) On the other side...
- One of my great-grandfathers was from Gorliczyna, in former Galicia (near Przeworsk/the Ukrainian border)
- The surname 'Burat' is found pretty heavily on this side, and I'm not positive at all this is Polish in origin
- Others: Taroski (pretty sure this is Anglicized), Bednarz (which I think clusters around Katowice and Opole)
Other surnames associated with people I've been listed as third to sixth cousin of on 23andMe, and so I share anything from a 2nd-great to 5th-great grandparent with them (and I don't know the names of any of these ancestors): Wyszkowski (Vyshkovsky?), Krutina (almost certainly Russian in origin), Dolinova, Staffova, Kalusek, Vitova (all Slovakian), Trojanowski, Czyzewski (may be Polonized Belarusian, especially because the surnames Hoskowicz and Pietkiewicz are associated with it, and I've heard -owicz and -ewicz are especially likely to be Belarusian), Dzwonkowski, Kowalewski (Kovalevsky?), Gabrych, Generalski, Janczukiewicz, Warminski, Jankoski, Nowakowski (Novakovsky?), Jorsz, Jursz, Zacek, Wysotki, Jablonski, Sendrowski, Krupski, Zilnicki, Pierzchanowski, Perkowski (Perkovsky?), Pent, Androv, Bakardjiev (definitely Bulgarian), Anuszewski (definitely Januszewski - I'm pretty sure that's Polonized Belarusian, Russian, or Ukrainian), Rajniak, Chudik, Benchurik (Ukrainian?), Strzelecki, Radulski, Anton, Wieszek, Terzic (definitely Serbian/Croatian), and Lewandoski.
--------------------------
Given this information, how can I tell, and what's the likelihood, of some of these surnames being from somewhere other than Poland? And what the heck am I if not half Polish, am I some nebulous mixture of Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian?
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Idwaajeden
