MyHeritage

I got a great deal to do my DNA thing with MyHeritage, and I just got my results back. I really dislike their business model; in order to see some of the other stuff that I'm interested in, I'd have to get a subscription, which I don't want, and which costs a lot of money. Why can't I just pay a one-time a la carte option of exactly what I want to see? That would show me my WHG, EEF, EHG, etc. percentages. I can also get, although I may need to run the data through a third party source, I can get a Y-DNA haplogroup too. Interesting stuff, but I don't want to spend $200 on that. And that's the sale offer; normally it's $300.

Anyway, here's the summary of the results. It's a little different than what my sister gave me, but it's a different company, and my sister isn't me; our genetics are obviously going to be similar but not exact. Also, her more updated higher resolution stuff was closer to this as well. Let me show it and then comment briefly.

I'm not surprised by the English, although I am a little surprised that it was able to narrow down the English descent to the areas specifically in the US where my relatives and ancestors were more recently. The Scottish and Welsh is really mostly Scottish; I'm not aware of any Welsh ancestry at all—although my wife has plenty of that, apparently. The Portuguese is also exactly what I calculated it to be myself (my great grandfather is 100% ethnic Portuguese—one eighth, or 0.125%.) 

The Dutch, Breton and French at relatively high numbers is surprising, but my sister starting having similar items pop up too, so I don't know what to make of it. The Dutch are, of course, the descendants of the Franks of the early Middle Ages. My earliest identified ancestor was a Norman French guy who crossed the channel into England with William the Conqueror. Other than that, the only other Continental European line that I'm aware of is a line from a different branch from Prussia that included some Jews who apparently left their faith, intermarried with some Christian girls, moved to Switzerland briefly, then the American south; but were still identified by their neighbors as Jewish, at least in terms of some ethnic identity. Nothing in my genetics says Jewish, but that's not surprising, as I said; he'd been intermarried with Christians for many generations, and whatever Jewishness would have been in genetic profile would have been diluted to invisibility. But I wonder if some of these weird and unexpected Continental European hits at low percentages may represent the data trying to account for that line. 

But the 10% Dutch I can't account for at all. My sister's most recent update had about a similar percentage of slightly different stuff; 11% German and 9% French (her Scottish was reduced from mine by over 10%, which is strange). I presume that all of those are trying to approximate some ancestor who's genetic scatterplot pulls in the same directions as a kind of Western Continental Frankish something or other; probably accounting for the Norman French dude marrying people within his own social class for many generations while in England and therefore keeping his genetic profile similar to his Continental origins... before one of my ancestors was far enough away from the inheritance that they started marrying locals and picking up the Scottish and English profile. That's my presumption of how to interpret that, anyway. In general, my confidence in the specific breakdown of the Continental European ancestry is somewhat low, just like the percentages are.

My sister also had a very low grade Finnish component. I'm not aware of any Finns whatsoever in my family tree. I don't pretend to know who all of my ancestors are, but that's been showing for years on her report, and I don't know if there's some mysterious Finnish guy many generations back that I just haven't noticed, or if that's a false positive because the profile just pulls in a similar direction for whatever reason to the Finnish cluster.