Scandinavian percentages on My Origins vs Ancestry

[ltd-jean-pull]

I'm interested in whether people have any knowledge about "Scandinavian" results on Ancestry and My Origins.

Does one company tend to overstate it while the other understates it? One relative has 4% Scandinavian according to Ancestry while two others are around 25% on My Origins. They are related quite closely (both maternally and paternally).

[The conqueror]

Scandinavian

I have between 18% to up to 30% Scandinavian on Gedmatch calculators and other services, and also a augnificant South European admixture (Spain, Italy and Balkans). None of it is detected by myOrigins where I am clumped under Western and Central Europe and British Isles. I am Norman by ancestry. Hopefully, the new version of myOrigins will be more accurate and meaningful.

[NCroots]

MyOrigins seems to vastly overestimate Scandinavian. My ancestry is predominately English & German. MyOrigins shows me with 36% Scandinavian. 23andMe shows me with 1.3% Scandinavian. The genes of Northwestern European people are really hard to differentiate, so it's easy to see how all Germanic peoples could be lumped together as Scandinavian (in varying degrees).

[dcx4610]

I'm 11% on Ancestry and 35% on FTDNA. A pretty major difference.

Meanwhile, Ancestry shows 43% Europe West while FTDNA shows 0%.

It appears FTDNA has different calculators for France/Germany/Netherlands. They are partially grouping France/Netherlands into the British Isles and having separate samples for Scandinavia and Germany. Meanwhile it seems Ancestry groups France/Germany/Netherlands together into Europe West.

Autosomal DNA is not an exact science. It's valuable for research but different population samples and different calculators are going to give you different results. The locations are generally accurate but the percentages can change drastically.

[Louis67]

Danish ancestry

my mother is Danish and all the relatives I know from her side. This means that I am supposed to be 50% Scandinavian.
According to FTDNA I am only 25% Scandinavian and for some reason 10% from the British Isles. The boundary between British and Scandinavian is perhaps a little bit obscure.
The boundary between the other ethnicities in Europe seem to be somewhat obscure as well.
I would expect to 25% West and Central Europe since my grandfather (from my fathers side) was from Munich and 25% East Europe since my grandmother was from Beuthen/Bytom which now is southern Poland but the region belonged to Germany when she was born. According to FTDNA now I appear to be 31% from East Europe and 34% from West and Central Europe.
I believe anyhow that people have been moving around quite some in central Europe and Denmark and that the ethnicities not are so easy to define and so homogenous.

[Odis]

My results here at FTDNA are just the opposite of other sites...myOrigins 0% Scandinavian...Ancestry 30% myHeritage 46%...

[Germanica]

This topic is from 2016 - I can't remember when FTDNA upgraded to myOrigins 2.0, but with the first version, I was 34% Scandinavian... with 2.0, I'm 0%. I have one Norwegian great-grandparent, so it was definitely way overestimated with the first myOrigins, but now with the second, it's way underestimated. At AncestryDNA, it's 2%, which is low but at least it's something. 23andMe has 4.8%. Theoretically should be about 12.5% so MyHeritage is most accurate at 12.3% (but then, they are way off on other groups). It's all just an estimate, don't take it literally.