Saturday, September 26, 2015

More results from 23 and Me Ethnicity

A second brother of mine has tested and I have his ethnicity results to go along with the ethnicity results of another brother and myself reported on earlier. 

Myself                Brother 1                           Brother 2                      %  Region
99.9%                    99.8%                                100%                        European
98.5%                    97.2%                                  99.6%                     Northern European
54.2%                    47.3%                                  58.7%                     British and Irish
14.4%                    20.9%                                  21.2%                     French and German
  2.0%                      1.0%                                    2.9%                     Scandinavian
27.9%                    28.0%                                  16.7%                     Broadly Northern European

  0.3%                      0.9%                                                                  Southern European
                               less than 0.1%                                                    Italian
  0.3%                      0.8%                                                                 Broadly Southern European
  0.2%                      0.2%                                                                 Ashkenazi
  0.8%                      1.5%                                    0.4%                     Broadly European
  0.1%                      0.1%                                                                 Oceanian
less than  0.1%        less than 0.1%                                                  North African and Middle East
                                Less than 0.1%                                                 Sub saharan Africa
   0.1%                     0.1%                         less than 0.1%                Unassigned       

This brother is 99.6% Northern European, 100% European. He doesn't show any of the miniscule amounts that myself and brother 1 show. Interesting but the variety of English genes that make up my family lines is considerably different perhaps from others. I have five waves of immigration from England over a period of slightly less than 100 years from 5 distinct areas.

1818 - Bewcastle, Cumberland
1832 - Etton, East Riding of Yorkshire
1850 - Bishops Nympton, Devon and Selworthy Somerset
1908 - Birmingham, England and Bermondsey, Surrey
         - Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire and Rugeley, Staffordshire
1913 - Upper Clatford, Hampshire and Turnworth, Dorset
         - Enford, Wiltshire and Kimpton, Hampshire

Although this may not appear to be remarkably different considering the size of England most of my ancestors came from small villages dating back in their family lines hundreds of years. Only Birmingham and Bermondsey, Surrey are large metropolitan areas.

Already I can tell with this third mentioned tester at 23 and Me and the fifth one of my siblings to test their autosomal (and other) DNA, that the percentages that we each received from our four grandparents was exceedingly different. Our matches tend to be extreme in terms of how much with most of us being quite different from each other. Phasing of my parent's DNA is the intent of doing all this testing and we are about to begin now working on that. We had started using the FT DNA data but now with several sets from 23 and Me we will proceed.

The next batch of testing is to do at least one sibling at AncestryDNA (I am already there) and perhaps two if I can find a second one willing to do that.

My understanding is that the Ethnic Percentages from 23 and Me tend to be the best picture of our ethnicity. Knowing each one of my siblings I had already formed an opinion on which grandparent that they most resembled and eventually I may take a crack at our grandparent's phased DNA as well. That will require some assistance from cousins and we do not have any first cousins and few second cousins and half-second cousins on both sides of our families. There are a number of third cousins and these will be the ones that I will have to rely on to work on the grandparents. We will see how far I progress with that!

But I do wonder what happened to the minute amounts of southern Europe including Italian, Sardinian, the Middle East and North African found in the rest of us? This latest result is 99.6% Northern European with the 0.4% being broadly European. The lack of this in the one set of results does give me the notion that this one brother received a larger portion of DNA from our maternal grandfather's mother than is perhaps the usual split. Waiting for the matches now to see if this bears out in matches. I think if I could have tested my father I would have found that he too was predominantly Northern European and it is just the Devon/Somerset ancestors that are giving us the southern European/Middle East/North African results.

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