13 May 2017

LivingDNA updated my family ancestry estimates

LivingDNA calls it family ancestry, others ethnicity, admixture,  biogeographical ancestry analysis, etc.

Today my numbers changed from those I received in February.


My initial overview was 82.4% Europe, 7.7% Near East and 3.8% Asia (East). That left 6.1% undetermined. Now it's 98.8% Europe and 1.2% Asia (South).

The detailed assignments within the British Isles are shown in the diagram for February and May 2017. The percentages are expressed to the nearest whole number.


There are changes as large as six per cent.
My proportion assigned to South Wales Border is doubled to become the largest component. There's a substantial increase for Northwest England.
The largest decreases are for South Central England, Ireland and Devon.
For Northwest Scotland it was four per cent before, zero now.

It's worth remembering there are several reasons why admixture results may not agree with your genealogical research. Your genealogical record probably doesn't go back to the founder population on all lines, which LivingDNA suggests is about 10 generations ago. Also you only inherit half your parents DNA. Successive generations fade out so you only have DNA from about half of your 10th generation ancestors. Then there's NPEs.

So put an uncertainty of at least five per cent on any value, including zero, just due to changes in the reference database.

The type of change I saw happened without announcement. You might want to check your results from time to time.


1 comment:

jennyalogy said...

Interesting, but mine haven't changed at all. They are still the same strange results that I mentioned here https://jennyalogy.blogspot.com.au/2017/03/very-strange-results-from-living-dna.html