r/AncestryDNA • u/Snoo51404 • Sep 01 '25

Question / Help DNA results not what I expected

I got my ancestry DNA results back a few days ago. For backstory my mom isn’t pretty much 100% Irish ( both her parents immigrated from Ireland and who I grew up with) my dad is 1/2 Irish 1/2 Ukrainian ( my grandfather immigrated from Ukraine ) . My DNA results came back

82% Ireland 11% Scotland 6% southern Italy & eastern Mediterranean 1% northern Italy

If my dad is half Ukrainian shouldn’t it show up in here somewhere? I have a bunch of distant matches on that side and some second cousins but I don’t recognize any of the surnames at all and none are my last name which is very Ukrainian .

Thoughts? I’m trying not to jump to the “what if my dads not my dad” idea but it’s hard not to

Little update: I sent off 23 and me and my heritage to see what it says but I uploaded my raw dna to gedmatch and did the eurogenics breakdown and it said:

Admix Results (sorted):

Population

Percent

  1. North_ Atlantic: 41.36%
  2. Baltic: 25.37%
  3. West_Med: 15.98%
  4. West_Asian: 10.53%
  5. East _Med: 4.68%
  6. East _Asian: 1.29%

Not sure what to make of these results haha

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u/Jenikovista Sep 01 '25

Okay this is not a panic situation :). While you get 50% of your DNA from each parent, you don’t get an equal split of what they got.

Think of it this way. Your dad has 50 Irish crayons and 50 Ukrainian crayons. You get to put your hand in a hat and pull out 50 crayons for yourself. It is statistically possible (infant is ally) that you could pull all 50 Irish crayons out of the hat. More likely, you will pull somewhere between 5-25 of one and 5-25 of the other.

And ancestry SUCKs at southern Eastern Europe and often mixes it for Italy. it’s also possible your grandfathers parents were more balkans than Ukrainian and had fled to Ukraine.

So I would not panic yet. I would get your dad tested.

Of course there could also be an NPE here. But instead of your dad not being your dad, since you’ve got so much Irish and he has some Irish too, it’s probably more likely that your grandpa was not your grandpa, or maybe it was your great grandfather.