Each of these four companies provided different results and I will compare these in light of what I know concerning my own ancestry from the last 500 years. Attempting to assign a person to a population is less difficult for someone who has a homogenous ancestry than it is for someone who is admixed from divergent populations. Some of the services will assign a primary population while others look at the constituent parts of one’s genetic background and provide an analysis of the segments.
Regional Populations
Another problem in comparing the results is that the various companies use different reference populations. In addition, regional populations are not consistent. For Europe (where all of my known ancestors hail), 23andMe classifies four regional populations: Northern European, Southern European, Eastern European, and Ashkenazi.
FTDNA’s European regions are identified as Western European, Northeast European, Southeast European, and Southern European. AncestryDNA features more European regions and these include British Isles, Scandinavian, Central European, Eastern European, and Southern European.
The Geno 2.0 project assigns local results based on a mixture of a variety of world regional populations with only two that are predominantly European in origin: Mediterranean and Northern European; however, the Mediterranean segment classification is not limited to Europe. With only two regional populations assigned to Europe, it is difficult to compare the Geno 2.0 results with the others – but we will get to this later.
My Ancestry
To the best of my knowledge, the following chart illustrates the nature of my ancestry within the last several hundred years. While I can take some lines back to the 1500s and beyond, others can only be traced satisfactorily to the early 19th century.
Primarily, I am English (38.28%) and German (31.25%). Scottish, Welsh, and Swiss are represented by each constituting 6.25% of my ancestry. My Scots-Irish, Irish, and French ancestries each contribute 3.13% of my lineage. My French ties come from the former province of Dauphiné in southeast region of the country.
Finally, my least represented known ancestry is of Norman stock from the Isle of Jersey. Two New England families on my father’s side constitute this lineage. My Gustin (formerly known as Jean de la Tocq) line and associated families are from St. Ouen’s parish and my Gavitt/Gavey line and related families hail from St. Saviour’s parish.
While I do not have any personal knowledge of Dutch ancestry, there are a number of residents of the Netherlands that match my mother on 23andMe with percentages that are consistent with third and fourth cousins. The origin of these connections has not yet been determined, but probably will show as one of my lines previously believed to be German. In addition, it is thought that my Maneval line, which originated in Dauphiné, may have intermarried with Italians in Piedmont.
National Geographic’s Geno 2.0 Project
In the Geno 2.0 project, the various reference populations are viewed from their specific admixture. Since my ancestry is European, we’ll concentrate on those references for this discussion. There are 12 reference populations from Europe and include the following ethnicities: British, Bulgarian, Danish, Finnish, German, Greek, Iberian, Romanian, Russian, Russian Tartars, Sardinian, and Tuscan.All of the above populations have Northern European, Mediterranean, and Southwest Asian components. Certain populations (Bulgarian, Finnish, Romanian, Russian, and Russian Tartars) also carry segments from Northeast Asia. Depending upon the reference population’s geographic location, the majority of the segments were either Northern European or Mediterranean.
Mediterranean is also found as the majority component in the following non-European populations: Egyptian, Georgian, Iranian, Kuwaiti, Lebanese, Northern Caucasian, Puerto Rican, and Tunisian. Mexican-Americans also have a sizable Mediterranean component; however, Native American is their greatest percentage.
Other regional reference markers that are not found in the European reference populations are Southeast Asian, Native American, Oceanian, Subsaharan African, and South African. For an overview of the reference populations used in this study, go to https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/overview-of-regions-and-closest-populations/reference-populations/.
For my results, my Northern European component at 41% is less than the Northern European reference populations of Finnish (57%), Danish (53%), Russian (51%), British (50%), and German (46%). My Mediterranean component (39%) is greater than that which is found among German (36%), British (33%), Danish (30%), Russian (25%), Russian Tartar (21%), and Finnish (17%). It is also considerably less than more southerly European populations from Sardinia (67%), Tuscany (54%), Greece (54%), Iberia (48%), Bulgaria (47%), and Romania (43%).
Since European populations also have Southwest Asian genetic components, my 19% is slightly higher than most of Geno 2.0’s European reference populations; however, it appears to be more closely aligned with Eastern Europeans such as Russians (18%), Romanians (19%), Bulgarians (20%), and Russian Tartars (21%); however, I do not have any Northeast Asian markers, which are characteristic of all of these populations.
I have included a chart of four reference populations compared to my results. Included in those four are the primary (German) and secondary (Tuscan) reference populations as determined by Geno 2.0. I have added two additional populations (British and Danish) for comparison purposes.
Geno 2.0 lists German as my primary reference population. I am in agreement with this as I have a large percentage of German ancestry and an even larger percentage of English. When one remembers that Saxon, Angle, Jute, Frisian, Viking, and Norman invasions occurred on British soil, Germanic segments would have contributed greatly to this ancestry.
According to Geno 2.0, “This reference population is based on samples collected from people native to Germany. The dominant 46% Northern European component likely reflects the earliest settlers in Europe, hunter-gatherers who arrived there more than 35,000 years ago. The 36% Mediterranean and 17% Southwest Asian percentages probably arrived later, with the spread of agriculture from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East over the past 10,000 years. As these early farmers moved into Europe, they spread their genetic patterns as well. Today, northern and central European populations retain links to both the earliest Europeans and these later migrants from the Middle East.”
Geno 2.0’s secondary population for me is Tuscan. Even eyeballing the results tells me something is amiss. While I have a Mediterranean percentage that is larger than the Northern European references, it is not comparable with those from Tuscany. I have included British and Danish references in the above graphic and they appear to be more in line with secondary and tertiary populations.
If I were to score the populations based on the total percentage differences of the three categories of Northern European, Mediterranean, and Southwest Asian, the Tuscan reference is not as close as the British and Danish references. I have a total point difference of 10 with the German reference; however, the Tuscan population has a 30 point spread.
British, which is logical from what I know of my own ancestry, only has 16 points of difference, while Danish is further removed with 24 points of difference – still less than the Tuscan example. While I would be in agreement with the Germanic identity, I am not in agreement with the comparison to Tuscan populations.
Family Tree DNA’s Population Finder
When I first received my Population Finder results, I immediately dismissed these because of the inclusion of 8.42% Middle Eastern ancestry. My Western European ancestry was reckoned as being 91.58%. Knowing that my lineages were all European, I could not see where Middle Eastern segments could exist within the past 500 years; any Middle Eastern ancestry would certainly been too far removed to show in my analysis. Since receiving the Geno 2.0 results and seeing how pervasive Mediterranean and Southwest Asian segments were across all European populations, I have rethought my original opinions on these results.
Ancestry.com’s AncestryDNA
Ancestry’s analysis has me baffled, as they have assigned 21% of my ancestry to Eastern Europe. While I have a slight amount of my overall lineage traced back to Ukraine, it was 38 generations in the past and its overall impact on my autosomal results should be negligible.
Although not all of my ancestors are represented by the pins on the map shown below, the ones that are present show the predominance of my heritage coming from the British Isles and Central Europe. None are found in Eastern Europe. While I would love to lay claim on some recent Slavic ancestry, I cannot and I question the results as reported by Ancestry.com. Like Geno 2.0 and FTDNA’s Population Finder, Ancestry does not plot the results by chromosome.
23andMe’s Ancestry Composition
Introduced in December 2012, I will have to admit that 23andMe’s new feature is far and above the competition in accuracy based on my known ancestry. In the previous incarnation called Ancestry Painting, 23andMe’s ancestral analysis was pretty Spartan. My results were, in a few words, pretty vanilla – or in the color schemes used at the time – completely blue.
The new Ancestry Composition feature fine tunes these results with additional global populations going beyond their original European, Asian, and African classifications to the expanded European, East Asian/Native American, Middle Eastern/North African, South Asian, Sub-Saharan African, and Oceanian regional populations. In addition, several sub-regional populations were also added.
23andMe also defaults to a standard estimate of your populations and allows you to determine if you want to be more speculative or more conservative in your population estimates. I’m ready to go for broke (read “reckless abandon” for me) and completely rely upon the speculative results as it gives me more options.
While these results remained 99.7% European, some additional colors were added to my ancestral spectrum. These were very small by comparison with 0.1% each for Native American, North African, and South Asian. The results could be regarded as noise or just very small segments of my ancestry.
With two of these populations occurring at the same segment as my mother, I have a tendency to believe that they may be accurate – but very persistent and fairly distant markers. She shares the Native American and North African segments. Therefore, the Southeast Asian must come from my father. How they fit into my ancestry, I haven’t a clue. I would have thought that my father’s side had more of an opportunity to have Native American blood, as a majority of his ancestors were in the colonies over a hundred years prior to my mother’s first immigrants.
One thing that I believe is incorrect is the assignment for my X chromosome as being “British and Irish.” Having already phased my X as coming primarily from my maternal grandmother (see my previous post on this subject), I already know that her ancestry was 87.5% German and 12.5% French; however, the contributors to her X chromosome were all German.
Outside of this misidentification, I am pleased with how 23andMe assigned the various populations. My German ancestry is somewhat underreported; however, I am assuming that most of what came from my Teutonic predecessors is found under the “Nonspecific Northern European” category. While not having any known Sardinian (0.3%) or Balkan (0.2%) ancestry, I checked with my mother’s results and found that she only shared the Balkan markers. She also had a chromosome that was nearly all Italian which I did not inherit. This may indicate the supposed Italian ancestry from Piedmont.
The Sardinian must come from my father; however, his ancestry was primarily from the British Isles. There is one possibility though. My grandfather’s sister’s middle name was the Italian surname of Marcelli. Unfortunately, we have no clue why the second child of this family was named Essa Marcelli Owston. Was she named for a Sardinian or Italian ancestor or a friend of the family? Of my great grandparents’ five children, this is the only name that cannot be traced to a family member or a friend of the family. Alas, this is another mystery that hopefully can be solved at some time in the future.
Conclusion
Of the four autosomal services, I would have to say that 23andMe has the best analysis and it lines up closely with my known ancestry. It is the only service that drills down to the sub-regional populations and gives you the opportunity to speculate or be conservative about the analysis. It is also the only service that provides a chromosomal analysis. With the current price at $99, if you are looking for an inexpensive ancestral analysis, 23andMe is the route to consider.
