Doesn't mean anything much yet. Ancestry.com a few months ago had me 51% Scottish, and I just checked just now and I am down to 26%. I think it was going off geneology, because I am partially descended from New England Blue Bloods, and alot of Scot was mixed in and paternal names carried. But this was all on the frontier.
23andme.com wasn't ever claiming I was 51% Scottish. It won't even bother to list scottish.
@Dignaga The TV show “The Doctors” did an experiment with twins and they used fake names and addresses and sent off their DNA and got two different sets of results. Also some have used 3 different companies to analyze their DNA and got different results with each one.
@cherokeepatti It's perfectly fine to get small statistical distinctions, but ancestry just halfed my scottish ancestry from half to a quarter- and my geneology shows a few centuries of scottish frontier names so it isn't a grand parent fresh off the boat (23andme nailed my 25% bavarian via my maternal grandfather). They just don't know what they are doing with scottish. Both companies are leaders in the field and 23andme is sheepish on stating people are outright scottish while ancestry just did a major algorithm change, so clearly they were debating this stuff at ancestry.com if they are getting scots right.
@Dignaga Neither have a usefull database of Native American tribes also. As tested by Vickie and her family against 3 and more known past generational relatives. Including a distant aunt known to have traveled the trail of tears.
@Gibbon Oh, there is a very good reason you can't get a lock on many native american tribes. They heavily mixed as the whites pushed west. Add to this all my german family except my infant ancestor settled outside of a indian tribe out west in the 19th century, established a town and heavily intermarried with them. If they went off tribes, I'd probably get listed as a native american even though I'm only like, 0.2%, because my DNA is spread amongst them like jam.
My ancestor was one of the survivors of cholera on the Oregon Trail, wiped out over half the family, then they settled in Oregon, then some members were killed in Texas and the family hunted them down to near the Canadian border, killed them and reunited and settled down. The infant grew up and moved elsewhere. Only member that didn't settle down with the Indians.
@Gibbon No, they just need Y DNA for male lineages (they can oftentimes determine your paternal family name via this) and for women mtDNA.
A example- male YDNA for ethnic jewish men is jewish, for women their mtDNA is arab. It means the Jewish men stole some arab women at some point in history and kept them. So in order to determine a jewish woman, you gotta follow very specific lineages so as not to mistake them as generic middle eastern. Then you have the issue that ukrainian jews are not ethnically jewish but rather are converts from the middle ages (there was a steppe Jewish kingdom). So you have to have a really high degree to nail these things down.
We have plenty of DNA from all the tribes, especially mtDNA. White people carry it. Tribes don't have ownership over it. Many white men alone on the frontier will marry and indian, but not the same for white women on the frontier marrying indian men. You also had alot of blacks mixing with indians. That goes back to the colonial period, escaped slaves.
So what a tribe might consider a Indian isn't going to necessarily match up with what DNA says.
Look up online Armenians and Greeks in Turkey flipping out being told they are Turkish. They had a ancestor who was raped during the genocide a century ago or earlier, and so armenians take it as a massive insult to be told they are Turkish. Erdogan, leader of Turkey, has disputes if he is of Greek or of Laz descent. I know a few Laz philosophers, they do NOT look like him. He looks Greek to me, but he is as friendly to the Greeks as Hitler was to the Jews.
@Dignaga I only know what they were told by both outfits inquiring why this known great great aunt by tride trace show up no where in any of the families DNA submissions.
@Gibbon You wrote that a bit weird. My trace DNA for native american is colonial period. It's a stupid small amount, but if a "real Native American" got pissed off at my meager claim and went back in time and eliminated that ancestor, I would not exist today. That ancestor matters that much.
Most of your ancestors have left you no genetic heritage. As Europeans, we all have some Roman in us, but it never pops up in commercial DNA tests (you can use your DNA profile and submit it to see how much you have of african pygmy and ancient kurdish- ancestry and 23andme doesn't scan for this). Most of your ancestors DNA is gone. I'm ststistically 100% certain I am a ancestor of Confucius and of Muhammad. You will not find them in my DNA. You build a time machine, kill either, 99.99% of whites and blacks would dissapear. A good number of native americans too.
You also gotta factor in who Indians considered Indians. The local tribes from my area, Mingo (a fairly new tribe, started in 1700s) and Wyandot heavily adopted white and blacks. Your aunt's ancestor could of been one of them. Due to soverign issues, most indian tribes don't want to reach out and sleuth these claims, especially those with casino dividens.
@Dignaga It's Vickies family not mine. I only know what she and her daughter told me. I found late in life I was adopted and my natural parents are most likely both French Canadian. I have no interest in my own heritage or them. I am the son of the parents who raised me. I couldn't have selected better myself. That's all I need to know about myself.
