The first thing that we're provided with is a pie chart and accompanying map detailing Elder's ethnicity. My experience is that many people have the most excitement for this information; will it show a hitherto unknown origin?
This information is usually a lot more interesting for people who's ancestors are obvious emigrants; Americans especially will see varied African, Asian and European roots that may have been lost as marriages removed surnames and the eventual derivatives of English, Spanish, Portuguese and French were adopted as a language (depending on which modern American nation their ancestors settled in).
It is less interesting, perhaps, for natives of a given country whose ancestors haven't moved for at least five-hundred years. In my personal case, I was unsurprised to find that my DNA is considered by today's algorithm to be 91% British, with the remainder Germanic and Scandinavian - an utterly standard expectation for a native of the British Isles whereupon 1,500 years ago there were large waves of Saxon and Danish settlement.
The estimates that Ancestry supply are based on comparison with a panel of around 50,000 'high-quality' pedigrees; definitely a flawed method but the best option we have. Because of this, we must take such an estimate as a helpful tool to point us in the direction of our ancestors, not an absolute truth. Indeed, this Ancestry result is refined every couple of years as more pedigrees are added to their panel. In my experience, ethnic regions can vary by as much as 20% between these updates.
In addition to this, other sites will offer their own interpretation of your ethnicity based on Ancestry's test. Supplying your results to MyHeritage and MyLivingDNA (FindMyPast) provides different results; the former puts me at 2.4% British with 57% Germanic and 40.6% Scandinavian (again, a reasonably likely assumption if you were to look at the split of my ancestors' locations in 500AD), the latter as just 98% European, 2% Central Asian.
It would be interesting if that 2% from MyLivingDNA was not just 'noise' as they term these small percentages. Going further back in time calls forth the writings of the classical historians and their records of some people of these isles having arrived from Scythia in the millennia BC.
This all to reinforce that the ethnicity breakdown provided by these tests can serve as pointers, but shouldn't be taken literally. My mother's 2GG was an Irishman, which is almost assuredly where she gets her 12% Irish - not a whiff of which reached my DNA composition, despite us (as you would expect) sharing 50% overall.
So, back to Elder. The preliminary tree we have shows their mother, an Irishwoman whom we have little detail about and their father, an Englishman, with a few generations of English behind him. It is surprising, therefore, to see that with the expected 43% Irish, there is a very unexpected 45% of Scot. That we have traced via the records nearly all eight paternal great-grandparents as coming from across the English Midlands seems not to mesh with this ethnic summary.
It is in the data that we will find our answers. It should be no trouble to link to the hundreds of cousins returned by the Shared Matches and hence little trouble to confirm those eight paternal great-grandparents. Of course, if we are not able to do so, it raises immediate questions about parentage!
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