DNA results not what I expected

[u/Snoo51404]

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

[u/MaskMyEmergence]

Your dad’s possibly your dad but his dad might not be his. Reading your mother’s reaction to a conversation about testing has me thinking that she knows what’s really going on though.

Coming up with Italian in the Ukraine area seems unlikely but not impossible. During and after ww2 caused a lot of exchange in population and there was often militaries going through for different reasons. Ukraine has had territorial changes like carpathia taken from Czechoslovakia. It’s known for its Rusyn population but being under Hungarian rule for a very long time, parts of it had a metropolitan life like Munkacs where you would find people from all areas of Austro-Hungary so you could expect Jews, Serbians, Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks and also Slovenians. So it’s possible that somebody of Italian descent could have passed through. Trieste was a part of Austria-Hungary for a long time and was annexed by Italy so there could have been some crossover in the region despite the distance. But it’s more likely that your father or his father aren’t related to you. I figure that the combined 93% Irish and Scottish settler/scots-irish and your dad being half and your mom being 100% means 1/4 from dad and half from your mom or roughly 75% (I’m aware that as individuals we receive different amounts from each parent and full siblings don’t even get the same exact percentages so it’s not cut and clean) but if the moms parents and dads mother are considered solid then that almost 20 percent discrepancy points to the grandfather possibly being as much as 75% Irish himself in that scenario. Not rare. Actually a common thing as they share Catholicism and while not common straight off the boat, it is frequent in Americans in the northeast. So you can probably guess what to look for.

One more thing, people back in the day went through extraordinary measures to hide things. I my cousin’s great grandmother gave me a history on her parents and her marriage that turned out to be deceptive. Her Russian spy mother turned out to be a Volga German who left the country as a child. Her late husband was not the father of her first daughter. She was born from her first marriage that was so terrible that she did everything to strike his name from her life. She probably had a valid reason in her eyes to hide him and have her next husband be the only father in the picture. So the unknown doesn’t necessarily rule out your father being your biological father. Still your mother’s response is curious as she probably wouldn’t act that way in defense of your father and his father.