Update to Ancestry DNA

So while the Genealogical community here in the US has been going mad over the 1950 Census, Ancestry made an update to their site that hasn't been getting a whole lot of coverage that I have been able to find. In the middle of this month, they started a new section of the DNA results section of their site. If you have had your DNA done by Ancestry,  you now have a new section called Ethnicity Inheritance. This splits your DNA matches based on whether they think they are your father's relations or your mother's, and in doing so, narrows down your DNA results based on whether they are your mother's or father's. 

I think this is my favorite change to the DNA results since I first got my DNA tested. I have a lot of things in my results that make me curious, and this definitely answered some questions for me. 

These are my results.  As you can see, it splits your results between your parents based on where they presume those results come from. As I said, this is based on the matches you get on Ancestry. 

In this case, I can see that Parent 1 is my dad, because he is the one whose father was Jewish, so even if there were a small section of Jewish on the other side, I'd know that the major Jewish results should come from his father, and therefore should be about a quarter of my results. In this case, I'm happy to see that even though I have more than a 25% result of Jewish in my results, they all come from my dad's side of the tree. Until now, I've had a possibility that perhaps there were some hidden Jews on my mom's side of the tree, but as you can see, I don't have any Jewish coming from her side of the tree at all. At least according to their presumptions. This doesn't preclude some hidden Jews on my dad's mom's side, but one of dad's first cousins on her side of the tree did have her results done, and she has no Jewish results in her DNA, so I'm going to assume that I am right here and all the Jewish results come from my grandfather's side of the tree. I am hoping to convince one or both of my aunts to take a DNA test to confirm this, but for now, I'm happy. For me, this proves that just got more than my share of my grandfather's DNA.

And this is my mom's results, which are fascinating when compared to mine, because you can see that very strong Welsh result in both. Now, I know her mother was Welsh. Both parents were born in Wales, so that's not a surprise. And while I was hoping this might narrow down whether or not we're Huguenot or not, unfortunately, this doesn't prove or disprove it. It just means if we are, it didn't get passed down to us, which is just as likely.

On the other hand, it does prove something about my great-grandmother on my grandfather's side. Granny was born in Philadelphia, but her parents were both immigrants from Ireland. They'd married in Armaugh, Ireland, now Northern Ireland, in 1883 before immigrating to the US. So we've always "known" we were Irish. I have record of them from the time they started having children in the US, but almost nothing before. I have since found out more, but of the four surnames I originally have for their families, the results are very interesting. Park, Dunlop, and Blair, three of my four third-time great grandparents's surnames, are very Scottish surnames. Quite often, you do find overlap between the two groups, especially in Northern Ireland, where a lot of poor Scots ended up after the Nobles in Scotland decided to use their land as pastureland and kicked out their tenants so they could. So I always knew it was possible, or even probable, that we had some roots in Scotland. But looking at my grandfather's half of this, with more than half Scottish ancestry, it appears that we're Scottish, and that that tiny wedge of Irish might not even be related to my great-grandmother, despite where her parents were born.

So two things definitively proven, at least to a very strong extent, but more questions. And that Finnish of my mom's makes me very curious. Given her father's father was at the very least German and Norwegian in descent, the mixed info on his side between the English/northern European, Swedish/Denmark, Norway, and Finland numbers, that looks about right for his side of the family. And having that random Finish section probably comes from some random inheritance over the generations there.

And I'm not the only one who has had a few questions answered. My friend, who had her DNA as well as her parents' and paternal grandparents' done about the same time I got mine done, managed to determine that the small amount of African DNA she has all comes from her mom's dad's side. We're very much looking forward to digging into all her results now that we can. it's all very exciting.

This change is the kind of thing that gives me hope for DNA technology. It's not about what they can initially do, because that stage is about trying to understand the data they're getting and what it means. But now that they've been doing this for years, we're learning more with each year that goes on. I can't wait to see what comes next.

So have you had your DNA done? If so, did this answer any of your questions? If not, does it make you want to try?