What to make of British Isles/Scotland DNA in 100% Polish Results

[Marko47]

How close are her closest matches from:
Britain
Ireland
Norway
Denmark
The Netherlands
Belgium

In addition:
Sweden
Germany (North)
France (North)

These countries/ethnicities are closest to British/Scottish.

I think MyHeritage and FTDNA can be inaccurate for many people as well. I get 5% Greece and Balkans on FTDNA and 8% Greek and South Italian on MyHeritage.

From Great Britain, about 95 matches in total, some of them being Polish. But a good amount are purely British with no signs of Polish ancestry. This includes the top 3 or so matches, who start off with 60 cM and go to about 48 cM and in the 40s, 30s, and 20s. There are 130 from Sweden same thing as before, a lot with extensive family names, none of which being Polish. These begin at around 53 cM and range in the 40s, 30s, 20s. The other places you listed all have some matches, but by far the biggest groups are the Swedes, people from Great Britain, and the US and Canada. The last 2 are hard to distinguish, because a lot of them have Polish ancestry, but we definitely have several on ancestry that have colonial American pedigrees with no signs of Eastern European people.

[Marko47]

Which genetic groups has she in MyHeritage?

Both her and I are in the Sweden Vasterbotten categories at the high confidence level. My mom is also in the French Canadians in Canada (Le Bas-Richelieu, Quebec) and in USA (Minnesota, Wisconsin and Massachusetts) also on high confidence, while I am in a similar category but one that includes Nova Scotia. Acadian settlers from France and some from Ireland and England in Canada (New Brunswick and some in Nova Scotia) and some in the United States (Massachusetts) (at low confidence though)
We have absolutely no knowledge of Swedish ancestry in our family and I suspect that it's Scottish like some people mentioned earlier.

[Marko47]

My mom on MH: 52.7% Eastern European, Balkan 33%, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh 7.5%, and Finnish 6.8% (The Balkan category on MH includes the bottom south portion of Poland where we are from)

FTDNA: West Slavic 82%, Magyar 2%, England, Wales, and Scotland 15%, Baltic <2% Arabia <1%

[Marko47]

Until proven otherwise, I treat these trace ancestries shown by MyHeritage or FTDNA as either noise or something similar to the calculator oracles. I have trace Ireland and Druze on FTDNA which are extremely unlikely to be real.

My mom has 15% England, Wales, and Scotland on FTDNA, and 7.5% Irish/Scottish/Welsh on MH. Neither are trace results.

[boilermeschew827]

For what it's worth, I've been wondering the same thing with my North German/Dane heritage. I thought my Irish/Scottish assignment was misplaced Scandinavian (for which I receive none on MH, the only test that yields 0%, which is incorrect), but I also recently found this:

https://faq.myheritage.com/en/articl...icity-estimate

My personal opinion is that this explanation is somewhat overstated. I find it a little hard to believe MyHeritage goes back that far with their test results. I get 18.5% Irish/Scottish on MH. FTDNA is also the same, the latest update is 35% England, Wales and Scotland - they do not separate German/Dane well. I have no ancestry in the UK or Ireland either.

[Marko47]

For what it's worth, I've been wondering the same thing with my North German/Dane heritage. I thought my Irish/Scottish assignment was misplaced Scandinavian (for which I receive none on MH, the only test that yields 0%, which is incorrect), but I also recently found this:

https://faq.myheritage.com/en/articl...icity-estimate

My personal opinion is that this explanation is somewhat overstated. I find it a little hard to believe MyHeritage goes back that far with their test results. I get 18.5% Irish/Scottish on MH. FTDNA is also the same, the latest update is 35% England, Wales and Scotland - they do not separate German/Dane well. I have no ancestry in the UK or Ireland either.

For me, if it was just the ethnicity estimates, I probably wouldn't think too much of it. But when you have matches that are corresponding to the estimates, and at some decent levels, that's what makes me think there's something to it. Especially with My Heritage, considering they have a lot of European people testing with them.

[Marko47]

If anyone is G25 savvy--unlike me--here are my mom's coordinates. I put it into a few calculators, but I never know if I'm drawing the right conclusions from them.

Marko47mom_scaled,0.132035,0.129988,0.067505,0.052 326,0.036314,0.026495,0.00188,0.006231,-0.001023,-0.014943,-0.001137,-0.005995,0.007879,0.014038,-0.006379,-0.001458,-0.004042,0.001394,0.002514,0.003001,-0.006988,0.004822,-0.001232,0.00012,-0.000239

[boilermeschew827]

For me, if it was just the ethnicity estimates, I probably wouldn't think too much of it. But when you have matches that are corresponding to the estimates, and at some decent levels, that's what makes me think there's something to it. Especially with My Heritage, considering they have a lot of European people testing with them.

Ah, I see. In that case, good luck with the search.

I have no Irish matches, but I do have GB matches on MH. The closest ones I think are faux matches, our common matches insinuate a German connection with no overlapping segments. That’s one that do overlap seem to be distant German ties from what I can tell.

[Jessie]

I can understand why people get confused with these places that they have no known ancestry from but if they aren't in your papertrail they are obviously incorrect. On FTDNA I get 5% Scandinavian and before update I got 9% Southeast Europe but both are incorrect.

On MyHeritage I get 2.8% Ashkenazi which is incorrect.

This is my daughter's MyHeritage. She is of only known Irish ancestry so the Eastern European, Greek and West Asian is just a faulty algorithm.



I would always go on paper trail as dna tests are still relatively new and when they update you can get some changes. When FTDNA updated recently all that 9% Southeast European was gone.

[Stefanie]

Some of those matches may be actual matches but some maybe not. At MyHeritage anyway, they have a problem with pile up matches, at least for me and my mother. My mom is half French. That French has been in the US and Canada for 300 or more years, but with only a handful of exceptions, all those French people married other French people. Until my grandmother married a guy from Mississippi. Lol. My mom’s paternal ancestors have been in what is now the U.S. about that long. They are of mostly British/Irish and some German ancestry.

Looking at her matches, she has many matches from the UK who all match on the beginning of chromosome 15. But they don’t match each other. And they don’t triangulate with any matches who also match that same stretch of chromosome 15. Nor do they match any of her known matches. Those I consider false matches. I have the same problem in the same spot of chromosome 15 at MyHeritage. But my matches there are tiny. She has some over 40cms for a single segment. That in itself is a pretty big segment to have been passed down for that many years. Also another red flag on those matches, she and I both get matches from every northwest European country at the same exact place. But none of them match each other on MyHeritage.

Having said all that, she does have matches from Europe who do not match that segment, and who do triangulate with known matches. But none of the segments are that large. Those may be legit. Ya just got to watch out for odd matches at MyHeritage. I’m not as familiar with matches at FTDNA. At both those sites my dad has a surprising amount of Finnish matches. So far, the ones at MyHeritage seem to be legit. They triangulate with his known matches. His ancestors have been in the US since Colonial days too except one German 200 years ago. I didn’t know of any Finnish before he tested, but I may be narrowing in on which of his ancestors may have been Finnish.

Good luck.