Ancestry Composition Summary
Yep, my DNA is still mostly British Isles and Scandinavian. No surprise here as that's what came back on the previous two Ancestry.com tests and what my family history supports. What was really cool about the 23 and Me test was that they actually presented the results in an interactive format for each of your 22 pairs of chromosomes (called autosomes) plus the 1 sex chromosome (hence, the 23). For each of the 23 pairs (46 chromosomes in total) you inherit one side from each parent. In these tests, it's not possible to tell which chromosome in the pair you inherited from Mom or Dad (with the one exception being the sex chromosome if you're a male - more on that later).
In this test I came out about 31% British and 27% Scandinavian. The biggest grouping was "Broadly Northwestern European" at 36%. This was a bit disappointing. As I read the fine print later I found out why. Although this test is very accurate when assigning regions, it has a really hard time assigning French/German ancestry (only recalls it about 8% of the time in their control tests). So, if you take the 36% in this broader category and give about 25% of it to French/German like the Ancestry.com test did...and, say, split the remaining 11% between British and Scandinavian and we're about in the same place as the prior two tests from Ancestry.com. Again, no surprises there.
But as I mentioned above, the fun starts when you begin examining and clicking on the data in the below pictures. The first picture is a screenshot of all categories clicked (the full map), the second picture is just with British and Irish selected, and the third picture is just with Scandinavian selected. Before I go into detail, I generally get my British heritage from my Dad's side and the Scandinavian heritage from my Mom's side.
Interesting observations are: #5 is entirely classified as British. Both chromosomes. That means I got something British from my Mom too. But guess what? #11 and #17 are almost entirely classified as Scandinavian. That means I got something Scandinavian from my Dad as well. Touche'. The pairs in #16 are cleanly split. The first chromosome is entirely British while the second in entirely Scandinavian. I think I can guess which one most likely came from Dad and which one came from Mom, even though it's possible it came from the other parent based on what I said in the beginning of this paragraph. Not as likely though. #20 is a very similar clean split between the two as well.
Some other observations are that there were small segments of Balkan and South Asian (India, Pakistan, etc.) that popped up. Kind of weird. I did find it interesting though that my DNA is 1% Finnish. Finnish is very distinct from all other DNA groups, so it's the easiest to assign/classify. This could be just a coincidence, but as part of my genealogy research several months ago I read that the area in Norway where some of my ancestors came from actually had a large Finnish settlement. At some point they were encouraging settlement in the area by giving away land and a large group of Fins settled there. Maybe we picked something up along the way from that. It's probably more likely that the Finnish just came from someone else in my family tree, but it's an interesting coincidence.
Moving right along I'd like to end this first section and post on #23. The sex chromosome. Males are XY, getting their X from their Mom and the Y from their Dad. Since this test only focuses on the X chromosome, females with two of them (XX) can't tell which one is from Mom and which one is from Dad. For many other reasons (not just this DNA test) I'm glad that I'm a guy. In this case it's advantageous because we know my X came from my Mom...and it just happens to be entirely Scandinavian.
