#52Ancestors - Week 38 - New to You

There is always something new to explore in our Family History research.  New data made available.  New websites to explore.  New books to read.  New relatives discovered.  New results to incorporate into our trees.  New knowledge to add.

Recently, Ancestry updated their DNA Ethnicity Estimates, so I have again been studying the new, updated results.  I have commented before that with every ethnicity estimate, my results seem to move further from my family tree as I know it.  This time was no exception.

The table below shows how my ethnicity estimates have changes over the past few years.  According to my researched Family Tree, my father's family is 100% English back to the early 1700s and further, and is primarily from the Essex/Suffolk area. My father's parents married in England before they came out to Australia.  My mother's family is at mostly English with some Irish (a Great-Grandmother), German (Great-Great-Grandfather) and Scottish (Great-Great-Grandmother) mixed in.  Most of her lines arrived in Australia in the 1840s and 1850s, and the various nationalities intermarried out here.  This is not reflected in my ethnicity estimate.  It is worth noting that in 2018 and 2019 the Irish ethnicity actually represented Ireland and Scotland combined.

	Sep-18	Sep-19	Sep-21	Apr-22	Sep-22
England	65	78	54	45	33
Ireland	22	10	2	2	1
Scotland	0	0	33	32	38
Germanic Europe	8	3	0	0	4
Ivory Coast / Ghana	2	1	1	2	2
Sweden / Denmark	2	5	0	2	19
Norway	1	2	9	14	0
Mali	0	1	1	0	0
Wales	0	0	0	3	3

Ultimately, we need to remember that these numbers are estimates only, and can still be quite inaccurate.  More important to most who are actively researching are their cousin matches, people whom the DNA tests show are being related. I have cousin matches on all the major branches of my tree intersecting at various grandparents, great grandparents and further back - so for several generations back I am reasonably confident my tree is accurate - or as accurate as it can be.