Tuesday, 16 March 2021

LivingDNA update

 I don't pay that much attention to the "ethnicity", aka Bio-geographical, estimates from the assorted companies I and many cousins have tested with as I'm having way too much fun comparing trees and mapping chromosomes to ancestral lines in order to focus on those matches that just have to be from somewhere on one or other of my brickwalls.

But a recent question on the DNA-Newbies list at Groups.IO prompted me to review if LivingDNA had added anything new into the equation with their update (about a year ago)

My original results may be found here although the link to the share within that post only seems to partially work now.

Now they look like this:


ie rather harder to distinguish visually which regions are strongest in my ancestry by their calculations.

Clicking on a region brings up a potted history of the region from the Ice Age to medieval times

The detailed breakdown by region comparison is

2017
              :

Feb 2020 

So I'm even more of a mongrel with less idea than before of where in particular to look to solve my brickwalls!

The Scottish groups are now more combined than they were.
I've been mining the shared matches between pairs of 2nd and 3rd cousins in our match lists for clues.
This amorphous mess of "Scottish" is well supported by practically all of these shared matches showing up as personal pile-up regions where there are an absolute heap of triangulating matches and the likely common ancestor back beyond our paper trails spreading out from the known ancestry in Perthshire / Stirlingshire to  include Argyll, Dumfriesshire and down to Lanarkshire.
And then there's that persistent percentage of Irish all companies give us - only 4% on LivingDNA 18 on Ancestry.
Every so often however I do manage to link trees of matches together and still hope that one day, I'll have some answers, or at least clues on which branch to target for yDNA or mtDNA to support my findings.

Anyone got a stray Archibald Henderson or Amelia Millar they want a home for?
Or a yDNA Jenkins or Buchanan to see where that might lead? ( yDNA testers wanted refers)