Spanish with non-spanish relatives assemble!

[agil]

I am trying to trace some recent ancestry and I need some help.

Background:

I am Spanish. The grandparents of my grandparents are spanish. However, I have some hints that I might have non-spanish ancestry, which would not be so rare considering the regions that my grandparents come from:
One is from Los Barrios, a town 20 km away from Gibraltar, which was founded by the exiled spaniards. They've been sea merchants in the mediterranean for 3 centuries.
Two are from Cordoba. In 1791, a group of 6.000 Dutch, Swiss and German were brought to this region. I do have on paper that I have a Bavarian ancestor from that era.
One is from Burgos. Nothing ever happened here as far as I know.

So I'm looking for ancestry that is old enough to not be remembered, but recent enough that it should show up, and I should still have relatives. We're talking no more than 3% of my DNA. The rest is set-on-stone spanish.

The new 23andMe has smoothed the results and has left them like this at 90% confidence:

Spanish: 96.9%
Ashkenzi Jew: 0.3%
Broadly European: 0.2%
Broadly Arab, Egyptian and levantine: 0.6%
Peninsular Arab: 0.4%

Funnily enough, the old results gave me 3% Northwestern European at 90% confidence level.

So I decided to check my relatives to see if there is some pattern that could help me untangle this mess.
I'll be using the yulvil chromosome browser, which allows me to get a better view of my relatives. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, this is what I found:

Italian

I've had several hints of Italian. Last year, one of my top Gedmatch contacted me saying he was from Italy, and asking me if I knew if some of my family ever went to Sicily. I said I had no idea but it was not off the table, seeing how my family has been travelling in the mediterranean sea for centuries.

Then, during the beta, I got Sicily as a match region:



However, it just disappeared after the beta was over. So I brushed it off.
I've checked my relatives with 4 italian grandparents, and all of our common relatives are spanish or south american. The chromosome browser shows the same, too:



Every single line there is a spanish or south american relative. Every single one except the italian relative, which scores no Spanish & Portuguese at all, yet he's lumped there.
So I can conclude that I have some relatives in Sicily, but it's them who have spanish admixture.

British

I have 8 relatives with 4 grandparents in the UK. Also 6 in Canada, and 1 in New Zealand, that score no Spanish. Also some in the US, however I am ignoring them as the spanish influence there could lead to some false positives.

The biggest cluster is in the 15th chromosome:



These are pretty big segments (30 cM), they are all 100% Northwestern European, with some being 100% British and Irish. And not a single common relative with spanish ancestry either. There are also some other small clusters with less people that are also exclusively northwestern European.

The segment is also the biggest of all matches, including spanish. Which leads me to believe that it's not just pure coincidence.

German

I recently got one match from a woman with 4 grandparents in Bavaria, which is exactly where my ancestors supposedly came from. She scores 100% French and German. We have no relatives in common... I also match another half dutch half german woman in 2 different segments / chromosomes. This is dissapointing because the Bavarian relative is the only one that I have on paper so I though it'd be easier to trace.

Ashkenazi

This one is the easiest to spot out. I have 0.3% Ashkenzi admixture in the 9th chromosome and over 600 ashkenazi jewish relatives. They all match exactly the same segment that is assigned as Ashkenzi. My bet would be sephardic ancestry that got expelled to eastern Europe.

Eastern European

I have some matches that have 4 Eastern European grandparents, from countries like Russia, but don't have any Ashkenazi jewish admixture nor common jewish relatives. Most of them have some Northwestern European. They also cluster with some other Northwestern Europeans mostly and the segments are not very big (5th cousin at most) so I think this is actually ancient.

So anyway these are my matches. Maybe I am reading too much into it. I want to know your opinion. Do the rest of spanish also get these kind of matches?

[Ibericus]

I am Spanish and I score Italian on every single test: anywhere from 2% on 23andme to 20-25% on Myheritage. And it is also my second European country by number of matches on 23andme.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to determine how recent my Italian ancestry is (if it is at all) and to be honest I am beginning to lose hope I ever will. I did ancestryDNA and I found I match 4 people with a rare Italian surname at 13cM. I also match a couple other full Italians at 16cM.

I am certain those are real matches but they could be medieval for all I know. So basically it's just a waiting game to see if better matches show up.

[Reggiemercer]

The megalith builders in western Europe probably came in from north Africa, so you could be overlapping with Brits and Celts who also have a fairly large amount of this ancestry, which seems to peak in the Basques:

image_2020-10-29_165209.png

I possibly have some Basque ancestry and I actually get 0.5 to 1% "Mozabite Berber" on numerous GEDmatch calculators despite having no ancestry anywhere near there. On top of that, Spain was under Celtic influence for a long time and Spanish Y-DNA is mostly Celtiberian.

[Shadogowah]

I am trying to trace some recent ancestry and I need some help.

Background:

I am Spanish. The grandparents of my grandparents are spanish. However, I have some hints that I might have non-spanish ancestry, which would not be so rare considering the regions that my grandparents come from:
One is from Los Barrios, a town 20 km away from Gibraltar, which was founded by the exiled spaniards. They've been sea merchants in the mediterranean for 3 centuries.
Two are from Cordoba. In 1791, a group of 6.000 Dutch, Swiss and German were brought to this region. I do have on paper that I have a Bavarian ancestor from that era.
One is from Burgos. Nothing ever happened here as far as I know.

So I'm looking for ancestry that is old enough to not be remembered, but recent enough that it should show up, and I should still have relatives. We're talking no more than 3% of my DNA. The rest is set-on-stone spanish.

The new 23andMe has smoothed the results and has left them like this at 90% confidence:

Spanish: 96.9%
Ashkenzi Jew: 0.3%
Broadly European: 0.2%
Broadly Arab, Egyptian and levantine: 0.6%
Peninsular Arab: 0.4%

Funnily enough, the old results gave me 3% Northwestern European at 90% confidence level.

So I decided to check my relatives to see if there is some pattern that could help me untangle this mess.
I'll be using the yulvil chromosome browser, which allows me to get a better view of my relatives. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, this is what I found:

Italian

I've had several hints of Italian. Last year, one of my top Gedmatch contacted me saying he was from Italy, and asking me if I knew if some of my family ever went to Sicily. I said I had no idea but it was not off the table, seeing how my family has been travelling in the mediterranean sea for centuries.

Then, during the beta, I got Sicily as a match region:



However, it just disappeared after the beta was over. So I brushed it off.
I've checked my relatives with 4 italian grandparents, and all of our common relatives are spanish or south american. The chromosome browser shows the same, too:



Every single line there is a spanish or south american relative. Every single one except the italian relative, which scores no Spanish & Portuguese at all, yet he's lumped there.
So I can conclude that I have some relatives in Sicily, but it's them who have spanish admixture.

British

I have 8 relatives with 4 grandparents in the UK. Also 6 in Canada, and 1 in New Zealand, that score no Spanish. Also some in the US, however I am ignoring them as the spanish influence there could lead to some false positives.

The biggest cluster is in the 15th chromosome:



These are pretty big segments (30 cM), they are all 100% Northwestern European, with some being 100% British and Irish. And not a single common relative with spanish ancestry either. There are also some other small clusters with less people that are also exclusively northwestern European.

The segment is also the biggest of all matches, including spanish. Which leads me to believe that it's not just pure coincidence.

German

I recently got one match from a woman with 4 grandparents in Bavaria, which is exactly where my ancestors supposedly came from. She scores 100% French and German. We have no relatives in common... I also match another half dutch half german woman in 2 different segments / chromosomes. This is dissapointing because the Bavarian relative is the only one that I have on paper so I though it'd be easier to trace.

Ashkenazi

This one is the easiest to spot out. I have 0.3% Ashkenzi admixture in the 9th chromosome and over 600 ashkenazi jewish relatives. They all match exactly the same segment that is assigned as Ashkenzi. My bet would be sephardic ancestry that got expelled to eastern Europe.

Eastern European

I have some matches that have 4 Eastern European grandparents, from countries like Russia, but don't have any Ashkenazi jewish admixture nor common jewish relatives. Most of them have some Northwestern European. They also cluster with some other Northwestern Europeans mostly and the segments are not very big (5th cousin at most) so I think this is actually ancient.

So anyway these are my matches. Maybe I am reading too much into it. I want to know your opinion. Do the rest of spanish also get these kind of matches?

Due to genealogy research I know my ancestry is 100% Iberian for 6+ generations in every sigle branch. Of course algorithms don't tell me that I score 100% in Iberian category, not even 100% in all the iberian-like categories (Basque, Sardinian, Italian...). Such a case is actually very exceptional and most of us usually score significant amounts in non-iberian categories. Mostly MENA and other European ones.

If you ask here, I suspect almost everybody scores on those non-iberian categories with higher percentages than you.

Regarding matches, same thing. Everybody is going to have "foreign" matches with different levels of confidence. In my case a group of them cluster together and at first sight they totally gave the impression of being real. They are all center europeans or north Americans with non-hispanic surnames. A German lady without Iberian ancestry actually shows up as one of my closest matches.

But I happened to have my parents tested too and none of them is a match of this group. The reason is that a very specific segment of one of my chromosomes (that is a recombination of my parents ones) happen to match a segment shared by everyone in this cluster. I suspect that for most of them it is a valid IBD they all inherited without recombination from a common ancestor while mine at least, it is just a recombination that only happened in me by chance. It is therefore a totally bogus match. A false positive.

if you have the chance of testing at least one of your parents, better do it.

Your ancestry report looks 100% Spanish to me. Sicilian people could easily have Spanish ancestors so it is not that you have an ancestor that came from Sicily, it is most likely the other way around: You and your match share an Spanish ancestor.

Regarding this alculations with percentages I see peope do with frequency, please remember that despite you inherit 50% of each of your parents DNA, that DOES NOT MEAN you also inherit exactly 25% of each of your grandparents and so on. The 50% you get from any of your parents is not an homogeneous mix of your grandparents from that side but a random heterogeneous one, thus you usually inherit more from some grandparents and less from others. This means that you are absolutely not guaranteed to have inherited from every single ancestor. All or almost all genetic contribution from a Bavarian ancestor could have been already lost after several generations.

Jews and Scandinavians are overrepresented in most genetic test databases. There is a big interest on this topic by these people. It is not strange to find a lot of them among your presumed matches (that are going to be overwhelmingly false positives in any case).

[rober_tce]

I find your contribution very interesting. As I told you in the other thread, your Jewish ancestry can be clear given the coincidences and that they triangulate with each other, but verify also chr. 9, it have a pile up region from 38 million to 72 million if you don’t have made yet.

As for your British relatives, in what chromosome position are they grouped? In the chr. 15 there is a pile up region, between 27 to 30 million in the chromosomal position, check it (I don't know how to locate the position of the segment in that graph). If it isn’t a pile up region, it has a good segment size that could indicate relatively recent ancestry.

Respect to bavarian ancestry, I think Shadogowah has found the key to this matter.

I particularly I haven’t native Eastern European matches, all of them that mark ancestry of these lands are Ashkenazi Jews. I have few italian relatives and don’t triangulate between them, so I assume that they are part of a common Roman heritage perhaps, or even iberian. Respect to my British matches, they don’t triangulate with each other, which may be ancient DNA, very probably from common heritage that could come from the Metal Age. I have a large number of jewish matches, all grouped in the same segment and succesfully triangulated.

[Shadogowah]

I find your contribution very interesting. As I told you in the other thread, your Jewish ancestry can be clear given the coincidences and that they triangulate with each other, but verify also chr. 9, it have a pile up region from 38 million to 72 million if you don’t have made yet.

As for your British relatives, in what chromosome position are they grouped? In the chr. 15 there is a pile up region, between 27 to 30 million in the chromosomal position, check it (I don't know how to locate the position of the segment in that graph). If it isn’t a pile up region, it has a good segment size that could indicate relatively recent ancestry.

Respect to bavarian ancestry, I think Shadogowah has found the key to this matter.

I particularly I haven’t native Eastern European matches, all of them that mark ancestry of these lands are Ashkenazi Jews. I have few italian relatives and don’t triangulate between them, so I assume that they are part of a common Roman heritage perhaps, or even iberian. Respect to my British matches, they don’t triangulate with each other, which may be ancient DNA, very probably from common heritage that could come from the Metal Age. I have a large number of jewish matches, all grouped in the same segment and succesfully triangulated.

If they don't trinagulate, they are not real IBD and the matches are with almost all certainty false positives. Common sense is to discard them. No need to overthink it.

[Ruderico]

I agree with what Shado said, so nothing you say seems to really suggest a recent foreign ancestor. I have a myriad of ~100% NW Euro matches (mostly British&Irish, some with significant French&German, fewer with Scandinavian) yet I don't really have any known foreign ancestry. My results gave me 6% French&German even at 90% confidence, but so far I haven't found anything to suggest this is nothing else than "masked" Iberian segments that might be closer to NWE. The key really is to triangulate matches in hopes of finding a foreign ancestor - your best bet here might be that Ashkenazi

[rober_tce]

If they don't trinagulate, they are not real IBD and the matches are with almost all certainty false positives. Common sense is to discard them. No need to overthink it.

I had understood that the British triagulate in any form in this segment, I think isn't clear as they has exposed. Without triangulation, is imposible to determinate an ancestor relatively recent. I said him in the other thread that I think the most probably thing is these matches show ancient genetic. Anyway, he should verifying if this segments are pile up regions or not.

[agil]

How do you explain the relatives that we have no other Spanish relatives in common?

IDGAF if I have foreign ancestry or not , I am genuinely curious.

[Ruderico]

How do you explain the relatives that we have no other Spanish relatives in common?

IDGAF if I have foreign ancestry or not , I am genuinely curious.

It can be DNA from a pile up region, or random recombination that happens to match that of people with whom you have no genealogical relation with. The latter can be an issue if you don't have your results phased with that of a parent.