About a year ago, my fiance and I ordered the Ancestry DNA kit from Ancestry.com. I’m not sure how much it was, I think we got a deal so it was cheaper. The kit came in the mail and we spit in the tubes and a month or so later we got our information back. I was very excited when I got the email that my results were ready. They looked something like this:
Most of the results were expected. I have Hungarian ancestry on both sides of my family, thus a large percentage in Europe East. The only thing that seemed strange was that the percentage for England, Wales and Northwestern Europe was so small. I know that my maternal grandfather’s family comes from England so I thought that this result would be larger.
I learned from doing this DNA kit is that I didn’t inherit an exact 50% of my parents’ DNA. This is, if my father is 50% Hungarian, I don’t automatically get 25%. I always thought that everything was split in half which, now that I’m thinking about it, doesn’t make sense. In actuality, I got a random half of my parents’ DNA. If my father is 50% Hungarian, I could get 10% or 40% or 27%. It is, however, more probable that I would get something around half their DNA (the 25%). So it’s possible that I didn’t a large amount of the English DNA from my mother but the probability would be low.
I didn’t second guess my results from Ancestry DNA because DNA can’t lie right? That was until I got an email from Ancestry saying that they had updated my DNA results. What?
Whoa! Big changes! Eastern Europe stayed mostly the same but Ireland went down by 12%. And England went up by by 26%! I also lost 10% from Scandinavia (I’m assuming it changed to Norway). Ancestry explained that the changes resulted from more reference samples. The first estimate used 3,000 reference samples but the update used 16,000 reference samples. More samples means that there can be more specific results for regions that are closer together. It seems like there will be more DNA updates in the future (based on the update FAQ) when this “cutting edge” science gets sharper.
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