Differing DNA ??

[cworet]

I am new to this and just received my DNA results and have a question. My FTDNA shows 80% Western Europe, 11% Scandinavian, 4% Eastern Europe and 5% Central/South Asian. However my Ancestry.com DNA result shows 56% English, 31% Irish, 4% Italy/Greece. I find it difficult to understand that FTDNA does not show any English/Irish since all my great grandparents (1840's), grandparents (1880's) and mother (1919) were all born in Ireland. How can there be such a discrepancy. While I can understand the English/Irish connection, it does not seem feasible that someone in the late 1700's would have moved from western europe to Ireland. Could someone help explain that and what do I do next, go to 23andme for a tie breaker.

[khazaria]

None of these calculators can perfectly separate Western European ethnicities and regions from one another on a consistent basis, and MyOrigins sometimes looks back further in time than the other tests, but some Irish people do score very high British Isles percentages in MyOrigins.

That being said, you already know that your ancestry is all Irish so why would you need 23andMe to try to confirm it a third time? Especially when there are free ethnicity calculators at the sites DNALand and GEDMatch that in themselves aren't perfect but at least you don't have to spend more money. Maybe the newcomer LivingDNA will eventually give the most accurate results for British and Irish people once they finish their next phase of building their regional reference populations.

Are all of your close matches in Family Finder fellow Irish people?

[cworet]

DNA match

I only had one match on FT and 3 on Ancestry. Ancestry were on the irish side but 4th cousins or farther away. Not a very successful match on anyone.

[keigh]

Look at the history of the British Isles for an explanation of the confusing DNA. Celts from the central part of Europe moved west finally arriving in the Isles and then moved over to Ireland and out of England, but not every person carrying Celtic DNA went to Ireland.

The Angles, Saxon, and Jutes Germanic tribes came over spreading over England and up into Scotland. The Danes invaded (one of the early kings of England was Harold a Dane.

The Norman French, who were originally Norsemen, invaded both England and Ireland.

The Kingdom of Alba in Scotland was formed by the Picts and the Gaels (Celtic language group) and then later the Scots invaded Ireland.

Unfortunately DNA doesn't peel apart like an onion, think more of mashed potatoes made from a numerous variety of spuds and you'll have British and Irish DNA. And pretty much the entire DNA pattern of West Europe follows the same mashing process.

Here at FTDNA I'm 57% West/Central Europe and 43% Scandinavia while my paper trail is a large part from Ireland (Ulster), Scotland, England. With Swiss, Flemish, Dutch, German, Swedish, and Finnish thrown in to confuse the matter. So my results make sense to me.