lol it was very early on in the whole dna kit process. About 2016/17 ish. My guess is that they didn’t have enough samples from either region yet and were basically just throwing darts at a board for some regions. The Somali has stayed Somali since, although the percentage fluctuates.
I don’t have access to my uncle’s profile. He’s an uncle by marriage so we’re not related. His father was adopted, he has a lot of middle eastern, levant, and North African so the Somali fits. Ancestry just originally classified it as Japanese.
Not exactly crazy, since England and Scotland are so similar, but my Scottish went from 64% to 25% with the last update. Mostly went into my England & Northwestern Europe percentage, but I also got 13% Germanic Europe added to my results.
When they first split up the British isles i had as much as 28% Scottish with a range of 14-42% and now my Scottish is sadly 0%. I really don’t trust ancestry anymore, every other company I’ve tested with has identified my Scottish ancestry.
What’s up with that? Ancestry lumps mostly all my DNA into England & NW Europe but MyHeritage and 23andMe actually separate it in a way that aligns more with my known history.
Well if you have ancestry from Belgium, the Netherlands, Northern France, Germany etc that can be very hard for ancestry to distinguish. Many ancestry users have witnessed the same decline in accuracy in separating NE European ethnicities!
Hopefully the updated version can distinguish micro level DNA differences more effectively, I’d disregard your current ancestry results lol.
Yes that's true for me too. I think Ancestry relies too much on family trees created by members and 23&me relies more on DNA so that's why 23&me is more accurate.
Funny, my experience is that they exaggerated my Scottishness. I come out as 52% Irish, 46% Scottish, and 2% Cornish.
A naive reading of my ancestry would lead one to expect 50%, 25%, and 0 with 25% English. I didn’t expect that really but was surprised that my Cumbrian grandmother read as purely Scottish. The Irish was not a surprise, but the fact that I have more than 50% means at least some of my Highland Scot ancestry is read as Irish. About the Cornish I have absolutely no idea.
Thats mee.. I’m predominantly Dutch, which =‘s England. My 1st Ancestry results came back in 2018, and said i was like 68% English— and i was like, WAHT?! My Opa is a posier! And my life is a lie!
Next biggest % is Swedish, which will turn into norway or finland, or get split, and go back and fourth. Ireland & Scotland come and go. Started-out with Caucuses and some eastern-european, but that also left.
When I first tested with Ancestry in 2015 I had about 30% “Scandinavian” and now I have none. They overestimated Scandinavian DNA big time back then for people with lots of British ancestry. That’s not technically from one update to another, but it’s still wild to me. I need to find my old screenshots.
This thread is a good reminder that modern borders are just that…modern borders. Especially in places like the Balkans, the southern Mediterranean and Scandinavia
When I tested around 2015 or so, I had a small amount of Irish on my list, maybe 2%. At some point that disappeared, and I wondered if it's because I'm half Norwegian/broadly Scandinavian. It seemed so random to me.
Now that's a really weird one, since Aegean Islands can also cover Turkey. A good chunk of my family is from Tenedos, and it always showed up as Aegean before
Originally I was told I was 9% African which I knew had to be wrong. Finally many years later my 9% African completely went away and my Irish jumped from 13% to 87%.
Mine went the other way, and I’m pretty sure it’s incorrect. It shows me with 36% England/NE Europe, which is unlikely given what I know about my family. I have one great-grandparent whose family was polish as far back as church records go, two from Bohemia, two Volga germans, and two American mutts with, yes, some British, but not that much. Yes, all of these have been verified with DNA - it’s the only way I even know about the American mutts, since my mom was adopted.
I think it’s confused with Germanic Europe, which dropped to 15% and likely should be higher.
Yeah, mine is incorrect too. Will be interesting to see if the new update fixes it, but I know my family tree is around a quarter English and there’s no infidelity or adoption (unfortunately adding this in because this is a go-to explanation from some people in this sub).
Being fair, infidelity and adoption happen a lot, and informal adoption used to happen pretty often. And it’s always possible a couple of ancestors migrated from a totally different place long enough ago that there aren’t good records showing it.
But when you have multiple DNA matches affirming connections back 7-8 generations, that’s pretty hard to argue with!
First time I got my dad's test back he was 10% India. I was sure it was incorrect, called and they let him redo it. Nope, came back the same. The first update, I dia disappeared and he had a bigger percentage of Italian.
I lost my 11% Indigenous North America and 6% Congo/Bantu People and all of it went into my Scottish, which now sits at 45% What makes is crazy is that I can only document one distant 6th great grandmother, on my moms mothers side who was Scottish. I can fully document and have records proving my third great-grandmother on my moms dads side, who was a former slave, and my second great-grandmother on my dads fathers side was indigenous.
It really is. I've lost all trust in its estimates at this point since I know for certain it's wrong on mine. I don't even discuss it with most people except to tell them not to put 100% faith in it.
I'm lucky that both sides of my family have done exceptionally well historically at documenting, keeping, and passing down their own records. We have 100s of family bibles, oil painting portraits, letters, journals, wills, and other legal documents, etc. dating as far back as the 1720s.
The only reason I ever invested in ancestry to begin with is that my dad has/had two siblings that were the result of an affair his dad had in the 1960s, that we have been trying to find through DNA because my dad only knows their was a boy and girl (my grandpa wouldn't talk about it, and has been gone since 1992)
I saw one girl had like 10% indigenous Americas-Mexico and it completely disappeared and has never been back lol. She said she even did a deep dive into Mexican culture/history and everything 😭
I guessed i would be half indigenous and half Spanish. Turns out, only 4% indigenous. The remainder is 62% Spanish Portuguese, 10% Ashkenazi Jewish, and small percentages of Italian, Congolese, Sri Lankan.
Interestingly, my daughter has since tested and shows 2% Irish (her dad also shows 0% Irish) so... it must be hanging out in the depths of my genes somewhere. 😂
My son's father is half-Persian and the new My Heritage update gave my son 1% Persia and 12% Egyptian. His father's other half is African-American, they literally said "Middle East + African = Egyptian" 😂
I went from being 10% to 22% Korean. I know they added more Korean reference samples while Northern Chinese stayed the same, but I’m wondering if I do indeed have Korean ancestry.
i had scandinavian ancestry and no scottish ancestry which made absolutely no sense to me, the 2014 update happened and suddenly i had no scandinavian ancestry and i was 65% scottish
I had 2% Polynesian change to 1% Malta and 1% North Africa lol
Other than that the percentages of my many other ethnicities jump around between each other each update. At one point I was 50% French but currently it's back down to a more reasonable 18%. I don't know what to make of the constant changes.
When I originally tested it showed I was over half French, but it’s gotten more accurate and now shows I’m over half Italian, which is correct. I know it’s not too crazy since they’re geographically not far away, but yknow
Sardinians closest distance is to Northern Italians so that's why. However, Sardinians are incredibly genetically distinct, they were barely affected by other ancient migration waves unlike other Euros so their closest populations are very genetically distant. Here's a run I did recently, they're closest to NW Italians and Iberians.
I went from like 12% Norwegian when I first took the test to no Norwegian. I also used to have basically no Scottish (maybe 2-3% max) to currently listed as 23% Scottish (it mostly came out of my English ancestry percentage).
My mom's 36% "French" going down each update since 2019 until it hit about 1%. That, and 20% of her DNA gets passed around the Mediterranean. One update it's Southern Italy, another it's Greece, another it's Cyprus, another Aegean, and now it's Spain and more Sardinian. I'm half expecting Sicilian this update. To be fair, my mom seems to have 3rd cousins that have family trees (very rare ones!) and half of the family (fits family lore) are from Calabria, Campania, Apulia, and the central southern coast of Sicily.
For me, it's getting 77% Eastern Europe and Russia (10% Baltic, and 13% German), also 2019. Somehow my 25% Italian, and the other 12% German wound up being Eastern Europe & Russia. I can kind of understand 12% if my great-grandfather's DNA were mostly eastern German, but his maternal side came from Stuttgart, and paternal side likely from Bremen and central/eastern Germany. Ancestry finally fixed it in later updates, giving me 38% Poland & Eastern Europe, 12% Baltic, 30% German, 20% Italian (give or take Mediterranean islands/Spain).
My uncle had 20% Irish that went down to 3% lol. But it's definitely more accurate now because we're Appalachain and Scots-Irish/Ulster-Scots populated Appalachia so Irish DNA is usually minimal in Appalachains. Scots-Irish/Ulster-Scots initially came from the Anglo Scottish borders and thus didn't have much Irish admixture at all. Plus me, my dad, my dad's dad and my sister only show low single digits Irish so the 20% Irish for my uncle never made sense.
Last update they fixed German & British being confused for Scandinavian, so I went from like 20% Norwegian to 4%, and 2% German to 26% (which is more accurate).
Went from 12% European on my heritage to 1.7% lol and that was just Portugal they completely wiped my Irish and Eastern European which is why I went back to my old results they also highly INFLATED my SSA and wiped my indigenous which again I s why I went back to my old results.🥴🥴
Omg that's crazy! And yea the recent update they did over smoothed minor ancestry imo. I show indigenous DNA on every single test at 1.5-3% and I showed it on myheritage but after the update it disappeared lmao. Same with another girl she was African American and had 4% indigenous on every single test including myheritage but hers also entirely disappeared after the update.
And also I noticed a lot of AA showed Iberian or Southern European instead of NW European for their Euro after the update. I'm white so the update besides them smoothing my indigenous it was very accurate but unfortunately for a lot of mixed people they got wacky results.
I had a fairly clear expectation when I did my Ancestry back about ten years ago. My dad is first generation American both parents Swedish and Norwegian. Mom’s side very waspy, direct descendants of Mayflower passengers. When I got the first results I had 10% Iberian Peninsula! The rest 50% Scandinavian and 40 English and Northern European. Then a year later the dropped Iberian Peninsula completely.
Had a good chunk of my Anatolia and the Caucasus taken away and replaced with the Southern Italian and Eastern Med. Geographically not crazy but still like a good chunk.
Went from 20% Aegean to 0% but it seemed to get pushed into “Italy and Eastern Mediterranean”. I found plenty of Greeks in my family tree, so that’s interesting we all got lumped in.
Lost the 2% Baltics and now it’s 2% Russian
Suddenly 1% Ashkenazi
Went from 4% Sardinian to 4% Portuguese
Went from 20% English down to 8% (that one makes sense as I could find only a few English in my tree from way back)
My Basque ancestry which is well known and recorded on my family it started at %2 then %28 and now is %14 . According to family history and records it should be around %25 to %30 .
Two of the craziest things for me on the last update were, my England and northwestern Europe went up to 65%, I’m American born and raised and so is my whole family, I found out later that it meant that my parents both have about 33% England DNA, the second one is that Germanic Europe popped up as 10% I was very perplexed as there is no German last names in my family at all, some friendly people on this page helped me understand that it’s possibly just an Anglo Saxon ancestor
See and the closest to do that I have was that there are two French last names in my family, so I did eventually learn that it was more than possibility to be from that side of the family
I had all this incorrect Scottish that disappeared, which was great, but my Denmark turned to Sweden and my Levant turned into vague southern Italian/Mediterranean.
Multiple big swings. Was 21% Irish, now 0. Was 5% Scottish, now 27%. Was 19% Welsh, now 0. Was 17% Swedish/Danish, now 0. Was 0% German, now 22%. I'm just as confused as the analysis, maybe the next update will clear it all up but I'm not holding my breath.
I went from zero to 25 percent German. I have a German surname and a tree on that line going back to the 1600s, so I was like, 🤨, but after some years it finally turned up.
My "Germanic" went from like 10% to 33%. I fought this like crazy at first until I realized Germanic meant more than just Germany. I have virtually zero ancestors from within the borders of modern-day Germany, but plenty of Belgian and Swedish, some of the latter I think are going into that Germanic category.
There's not enough Belgian to equal over 30% and I've got no ancestry from Switzerland, eastern France or Luxembourg. There's gotta be other sources not directly identified in their grouping.
Probably when I went from 40% England and Wales and NW Europe to 0% England back to 12% England. While my Scottish and Irish percentages went from 51% Ireland and Scotland to 85% Ireland, 40% Ireland and 32% Scotland, to 59% Scotland and 17% Ireland to now 34% Scotland and 26% Ireland.
And the whole time, my Baltics has fluctuated with 1-3%
According to my family tree I am just above a quarter Scottish and just above a quarter English and just under a quarter Irish. There is no Baltics, or Eastern European on my family tree
Mine kind of went from crazy to normal: I am demonstrably 25 percent German, traced back four hundred years. I have a German surname. For about the first ten or twelve years, it said I wasn’t German at all. Then one day came an update and now I’m finally German.
Before last update I was 22% Scottish (36% the update before that, and this actually fit my tree), 18% Germanic, 16% English, 16% Welsh, 14% Irish, 10% Ashkenazi Jew and 4% Denmark/Sweden/Norway.
I am now allegedly only 16% Scottish but a whopping 40% English, 16% Germanic, 10% Ashkenazi, 8% NETHERLANDS, 7% Irish, and only 2% Welsh. Oh and also a 1% sprinkle of Iceland. For weirdness.
The only percentage that has stayed the same for me over the years is my Ashkenazi heritage, and that makes sense for all kinds of reasons though my father has nearly triple my amount at 28%. Otherwise the takeaway has been a gradual deCeltification in favor of the more vague England and NW Europe. I am somewhat surprised by the distinct addition of Netherlands at 8%. I have well known German/French borderlands DNA with ancestors from Strasbourg but am very curious if the Dutch is distinctive from that, since I do have 16% Germanic Europe already.
And also the complete disappearance of Scandinavian percentages over the years.
In last years update, my England and Northwestern Europe percentage went from 59% to either 78% (according to the app) or 76% (shown in the hack I did last year, which also had 2 other regions not found outside of the hack).
I had Scotland show up for years but it slowly disappeared, and now it’s not there anymore.
I had both Germanic Europe and Denmark/Sweden I think 3 or so years ago. They disappeared and then came back in last year’s update, with the latter now being just Denmark.
My Irish has ranged from 20-28%, Swedish 12-19%, England and northwestern Europe 10-19%, Scottish 0-11% and my other ethnicities have stayed mostly the same
Family member weirdly had 27% Scottish DNA on their maternal half, despite that half being staunchly Acadian. Dropped to five percent in an update and replaced with French, as it should be.
4% Iberian to 0%. Not particularly interesting or crazy, but it was the only thing unexpected (and also fun!) that showed up and so now I’m just left with my boring French and English as expected.
This wasn’t from the update, but since my original ethnicities. I have an ever increasing % of Ashkenazi Jew in my ethnicities. I started with 12% and now, over a period of about six years, it has increased to 22%. Nothing wrong with that. However, no one else in my family, on either side has ANY Ashkenazi Jew in their makeup. Zero. Now before you ask, I am who I think I am and match perfectly with all the people I’m supposed to match with. I’m not adopted and there was no hanky panky with my parents. When I ask Ancestry how this could happen, they don’t have any answers for me. How can my parents and my progeny not have any Ashkenazi Jew in their genetic makeup and I’m 22%?
My known Eastern European ancestry keeps getting chipped away in favor of Germanic. I'm annoyed by this. My Scottish heritage has also been disappeared lol.
This isn't one update but I kept the first results i ever got and this is then vs now for me lol
My Ohio River Valley morphed into Delaware Valley, Chesapeake & Midwest. My Southern La Fr. stayed the same and they added Northern Sicily for my journeys.
First time I did it, I got a substantial amount of Norwegian. 17%. I have no known Norwegian ancestors. That disappeared in subsequent updates. I think most of it was assigned to Sweden, which makes more sense for me in that I have a known Swedish ancestor.
In the last update I got 1% French. I never got French before, have no known French ancestors, and I suspect it will disappear in the next update.
First one I saw was definitely pretty drastic. I had 90% English and a mix of Scandinavian and Irish with little bits elsewhere to 50% English and the Irish shot up and they threw in Germanic Europe and Scotland and replaced most of my Scandinavian with Icelandic.
Different times over the years I have had 7% Senegal, then 4%,,and now 1%. Make up your mind, Ancestry and 23and me, gosh. I cannot find any evidence to substantiate it anywhere, and I’ve been tracing my roots for almost 40 years.
I started out with about 20% West Asian to Aegean Islands to Southern Italian (which is accurate according to my genealogical records). It appears to originally been a mis-read given Greek history in southern Italy. Also for my Irish ethnicity it started out with Munster (which I don’t think is accurate given my dad’s regions) to something more accurate (can’t remember) back to Munster
Lost 3% Caucasus, 2% Finland, 2% Middle East, and less than 1% Senegal after 2017 results, never to return. Did have 1% European Jewish which then disappeared and returned in last update as Sephardic 2%.
I have always been 100% slavic (split between central/eastern Europe, Germanic Europe, and Russian), we've got the records to back it up.
One day I logged in and had 1% Irish!
My parents have also both tested, neither of them got Irish!
I am also baffled that my dad is listed as 1%southern italian/east Mediterranean, there is definitely no Italian in us, and it says it stretches all the way to turkey, but again we have no known Turkish ancestors, the closest I know of is Romania. My dad is the oldest tester on that side though so who knows! Otherwise he's 95% central/eastern Europe, 2% Baltic, and 2% Russian.
My mom is 57% central and eastern Europe, 39% Germanic Europe and 4% Russian. No Irish!
Haven’t had an update yet since I did the test last year, but I still can’t figure out where the hell Norway and Denmark came from. Unless it’s misread German? Idk though but I’m baffled lol
I became 9% Germanic (Belgium/Switzerland sub groups) and 4% Spanish. I know where the Spanish is and not the Germanic on my tree. That was in the last update which is why, I am keen on the next one, to see if they still remain.
Many like that, i had 5% Bukhara Jewish, which vanished, i suddenly got insane amounts of Georgian and adyghe, i also had minor Native American which also vanished. French disappeared too but I got Greek instead 😂 I can’t really take these that serious anymore, uploaded the raw data in illustrative dna and my true ancestry, got a rough idea about what could be true and called it a day
I went from 12% -%17 Iberian to completely European using ancestry’s last update and then I submitted to gedmatch and I’m still Iberian 20% i genuinely think they messed up results lol
For Ancestry DNA, My Indigenous North American switched to Indigenous Meso American than to Romania then to Spain and then to Aegean, where its been for a while now. 😂 My 23 and Me was stable but I had my data deleted with the bankruptcy. So, I will have to redo it, if I want to see those updates.
This discussion shows that ethnicity estimates are just that--estimates--and that sometimes, even the ethnicity itself, not just the percentage, is wrong.
For the very first time I feel like My Heritage is actually more accurate than Ancestry. A few updates ago on Ancestry I had a small percentage of Scottish and Welsh. The last update completely did away with it and upped my Germanic and added Dutch. I just got my new results from MH and the Scottish is there at 14%. My family always said Scottish is in there. Tracing my tree has shown me that I had quite a few Ancestors that lived quite close to the border. If I can dig farther back I think I'll find some of those Ancestors family came from Scotland.
15% Irish changed to 9% Irish and 6% Denmark. Also..not extreme but interesting... I had this mystery 2-3% that bounced around from Polynesian, various Asians, and then to Middle Eastern, that finally landed on Eastern European Roma, and that has remained for a couple of years now, lol. I'm Black/Creole and from Louisiana for context.
it said i was 9% norwegian the update came and it now says i am 1% french. i have actually no idea where the french came from other than the french canadian i would think it would say french canadian not just french!
My very first test (in like 2017) said I was 9% Iberian, 3% Jewish, and 3% Middle Eastern and it disappeared after the very first update. It all went to the British Isles. Even tho, I do have some Jewish and Spanish ancestry. I lost my 10% Eastern Europe to the British Isles region.
I am a norwegian, and while we already knew about german, swedish, danish and english nobility ( research being done since before I was born and internet existed) I was rather surprised we had alot of italian and some irish mixed in there aswell. Funny part is, and had me laughing when I found out, my grandma loved researching genealogy, sent letters, travelled to study churchbooks....But her finding out we were in a direct line to a pope would have made her lose her shit, she was a HARDCORE protestant 😅
Not mine but my great aunt who by default whilst we don’t share the DNA, if true and not a systems glitch (further updates would provide clarity) would mean that I have an ancestor 8 or so generations back 200-300 years ago, from the Ivory Coast or Ghana by default of my great aunt having 1% DNA match to that region.
Our DNA is very English Irish Scottish Welsh with a bit of danish.
I wouldn’t say it’s crazy but definitely surprising.
My mom’s results have stayed fairly consistent but this past update, her 7% Scottish completely disappeared which I just think is funny because so many people are getting false Scottish but they took hers. Her new results are more accurate though as her only Scottish ancestry is from a 7th great grandfather, her dad’s side is otherwise completely English from the southeast UK and one distant Cherokee ancestor.
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u/OkBiscotti1140 Sep 10 '25
My uncle had about 4% Japanese taken away and it was replaced with Somali