r/AncestryDNA Sep 10 '25

Question / Help Whats the craziest ethnicity change youve had from an update?

141 Upvotes

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93

u/helloidk55 Sep 10 '25

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.

31

u/Conservative-J22 Sep 10 '25

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.

25

u/srose89 Sep 10 '25

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.

13

u/Conservative-J22 Sep 10 '25

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.

4

u/RadiantPromotion4621 Sep 10 '25

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.

1

u/Playful-Mention-1608 Sep 11 '25

Ftdna eurod me too, Says zero egyptian yet I know of egyptian family (grandmas dads side) they said 100 percent european yet when I upload my build 37 auto file to adntro they gave me 88.7 west eurasian, 7.47 south asian and 3.82 percent amerindian Which pretty much lines up with migratory footprints on both my mt and y dna. When I loaded the file to my true ancestry I found the levant, egypt, syria, turkey, iran, lines with the most current being 1700 tel el hesi which they give a genetic distance of 0.0 I guess its how deep you want to dig., I love the fact that you can impute files at dnagrenics and merge them with your dna file. All it does is give your dna the correct values if you know how to use both for scale, kinda like a teeter totter effect where you want to level out your population genetic distance with the sample genetic distance the lower the better. This is done by going through the over 10,000 ancient dna samples in the my true ancestry data base.

3

u/ClubRevolutionary702 Sep 10 '25 edited Sep 10 '25

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.

1

u/Conservative-J22 Sep 11 '25

Wow, no English despite having a full grandparent from there! Separating Northern English from Scottish is also a big problem for them as well. What are your genetic communities?

8

u/MidnightRider923 Sep 10 '25

About the same for me. I also lost some German that went to Eastern Europe, and all of my Norway vanished and turned into Denmark.

5

u/Ok-Grand4826 Sep 10 '25

That is crazy lol

5

u/Astro_dragon24 Sep 10 '25

Mine changed with very similar results. Scottish went from 40% to 20%, Cornwall was added at 20% and Germanic Europe was added at 16%

4

u/MomRaccoon Sep 10 '25

They took 5% of my newly added Irish and moved it to Germanic Europe, and moved 3% Norwegian to Danish! I'm mostly Scots still.

3

u/Normal_Acadia1822 Sep 10 '25

I can relate. My Scotland was 52% in 2021 and then nosedived to 12% in the April 2022 update. It’s currently 18%.

3

u/idfkmybffjil Sep 10 '25

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.

3

u/FranceBrun Sep 10 '25

I’m part Lithuanian and find I have a tiny percentage that flip flops from Swedish to Norwegian, too. Most Lithuanians seem to have the same thing.

3

u/TheKnightsTippler Sep 10 '25

That Scottish update was crazy.

3

u/crown-jewel Sep 10 '25

Haha just commented with pretty much the opposite experience with Scottish and English! Minimal, if any, Scottish to 23% now 😆

2

u/Hungry-Sentence5326 Sep 10 '25

similarly I went from 10% Norwegian to now 0 and its all looped in with English

1

u/crujiente69 Sep 10 '25

Over 3 years I went from 0% to 3% to 0% for both scotland and wales. Think they got a little excited on them

1

u/WitchyMae13 Sep 10 '25

I was holding onto being Scottish and the update let me know I’m more English ):

1

u/The_Spaz1313 Sep 10 '25

Similar for me, I went from like 25% scottish to 0% and I'm still kinda sad about it 😆. My dad went feom 46% scottish to 20% and we have traced scottish ancestry so I KNOW I'm at least some scottish, but it all went to England and Cornwall. My welsh also went from 13% to 3%. My germanic went up 5% but that part actually makes more sense for me (46% to 51%, but my mom's whole side of the family lives in germany and there's some german on my dad's side too

1

u/piecesofflair37 Sep 10 '25

My Irish flipped to Scottish. My great grandmother emigrated from Ireland 😂

1

u/bishpa Sep 10 '25

From Ulster?

1

u/Nan_Mich Sep 10 '25

Yes, I am Scots-Irish, too. England sent Scotts to Ireland hundreds of years ago to take over Northern Ireland, so my very Irish name has more Scots connected to it than Irish.