Just this week Ancestry updated my Ethnicity Estimate. As more data becomes available your DNA results can be recalculated to better reflect your genetic makeup.

I am using a post I wrote for the last update and adding additional information.

Ancestry lets you know that ‘Your DNA doesn’t change, but our science does.’

Here you can see my previous Ethnicity Estimate overviews above and the current one below them.  You can see that my percentage of England & Northwestern Europe has shrunk a little bit over time. They has also removed Wales from the group in this update.

So what has changed to make this happen?

Ancestry has better defined the areas that make up England & Northwestern Europe.

With my original estimate I was surprised that I did not have any Germanic Europe in my results. My Mother had 26% Germanic Europe and for my Father it was 3%. I knew that the Germanic Europe from my Mother comes from Switzerland, France and the area of Germany along the French border.  You can see here that this region is still showing up in England & Northwestern Europe.

Here you can see the full list for the Ethnicity Estimate and the changes over the three estimates. It has been further refined and you can see that the Germanic Europe has disappeared.

Here you also see Migrations and they fit in exactly with what I know about my ancestry through years of genealogy research.

The Pennsylvania Dutch Country Settlers is my 1/4 Amish ancestry as well as a few other minor branches of the family.

First Map

Second Map

Current Map

Here are the maps of my DNA results. You can see that the borders are a little more precise in the newest update. This is because they only show the base region and not the extended regions.

The small orange circle in Europe is the Amish heartland and I should have close to 25% of my DNA from there.

With the current definitions for England & Northwestern Europe you can see the the Amish Homeland is definitely included.

The area in the small circle includes a good portion of the areas in France, Switzerland and Germany where the Amish lived prior to their immigration to the US.

See: Amish Origins

In the last post I wrote:

I am actually a bit surprised that they cannot be more precise with showing the Amish DNA as they have access to well documented and extensive family trees that show where the Amish lived and how they are connected.

Perhaps in the next update they will have more precise data based on ThruLines.

I believe that they are now more precise in showing that the area where most of the early Amish in America originated is included in England & Northwestern Europe.

Steven