Why don't my Family Ancestry Results reflect what I know about my family history?

In order to understand the outcome of the testing, you need to understand just a little about DNA inheritance. First of all, because you receive half of your DNA from your mom, and half from your dad, that already means that your DNA cannot tell a complete story of your family. In fact, your DNA can only tell HALF of your parents' story. We can expand this idea out to your grandparents and great grandparents.  For example, if your dad was 25% Italian (one of his grandparents was Italian), you might expect that you would be 12.5% Italian ('cause half of 25 is 12.5). So you might be surprised when you are only 5% Italian. However, that is completely normal, and just represents how DNA inheritance is completely random.

 

If you think this kind of inheritance is fascinating (who wouldn't?!), these resources can hopefully help you understand and shed some further light into this: 

In addition to understanding that our DNA cannot tell the full story of our heritage, our family ancestry test can show links from up to 10 generations back! Your results may be a surprise because your connections to these places could be before the time of genealogical records.

It is also helpful to keep in mind that anything below 5% could be either noise (interference in the results from the processing/quality of the sample) or it could be an actual region-like relic from a very very distant ancestor many hundreds of years ago that has survived all the generations of mixing and inheriting of the DNA.

 

Currently, in the family ancestry part of our testing package, we have reference samples from over 150 regions with which we can compare your DNA. These regions will have geographically recognisable names, but may not fit exactly into the geographical and political borders and can cover many places. If our algorithm detects a signature that matches your DNA, that region will be assigned to you. 

 

This is no easy task as many populations are themselves formed from the mixture of other populations. Our algorithm will attempt to match you directly to a population or region. Sometimes we may not have a reference sample and in some areas we may have a low sample size for the region, or it could be that there is a further population structure within that population/region that makes it near impossible for our our algorithm to match you to a region. In this case we are likely to assign you some ancestry to the populations that contributed to that region and so you will see your DNA linked to an unexpected regions. 

 

We also know that some populations are genetically close and will share a very similar signature. This means that sometimes, even our fine-scale algorithm cannot distinguish between these very genetically similar regions. If this is the case, then your DNA will be linked to the best reference dataset that we have. 

 

We understand that when taking a genetic ancestry DNA test, you may have expected to get a set of final results, but in truth it is important to note that all family ancestry results, from any company, are estimates, and are based on comparing your DNA to a range of reference samples. Your Living DNA test is designed to give you the most accurate results based on the information presently available to us. We aim to continuously work to expand our overall reference dataset which will allow us to update your results and provide you with more detail so your ancestry breakdown will be refined over time.