Ancestry DNA chromosome painter

Just found this under 'DNA Story'.

 

Yes, I found this yesterday too. It isn't a lot of use to me as I cannot test either of my deceased parents and they both seem to have had very similar origins, according to the Ancestry analysis, so I don't know which is parent 1 or parent 2. If I could compare this information with my DNA matches then it could be VERY useful, as for a number of my matches I do know which of my parents - and grandparents - they are related to.

 

On going to look, I find do I have this feature. But I don't see that it tells me anything useful, and I'm not convinced it will for anyone else either.

The context here is that I never took much notice of the "ethnicity" stuff since I know what it should be. All my father's known ancestors were born in Aberdeenshire or a neighbouring county. For my mother, three quarters of hers were born in Suffolk and the rest in the home counties. One partly "foreign" ancestor more than six generations back isn't likely to show up anyway

So when the latest version of Ancestry's numbers says I have 50% Scottish, all from parent two, and 43% English with the rest assorted Scandi, my reaction is just "yes - that looks right". I might add "why were your earlier efforts so far from that?", though I never recorded what those numbers were.

Now I'm told every chromosome pair has one that's painted as Scottish, and the other one is English except three of them Norewgian and the end of another Swedish/Danish - so what? Incidentally, does the position of the colours within that shared one mean anything? Ancestry's short FAQ says: "With this data, you can get a general feel for how recent your connections are to your ethnicity regions. The longer a segment (a single colored block) is for a region, the more recent your connection to that region may be", which seems to suggest it does.

 

Indeed, that's what I meant, perhaps poorly expressed. If Ancestry gave us a Chromosome browser that enabled us to compare ourselves with our matches, and not just compare our two (perhaps not clearly identified) parents, it would be very useful. I know we can do that on some other sites, but only for the matches that have tested with, or uploaded to, those sites.

 

I found this too, thanks. My Welsh percentage keeps increasing, now 40% even though the only Welsh person on my tree is my maternal grandfather. Knowing this I have concluded that my mother is parent 2. I then have English 36% which I understand and Scottish 22% which I don't understand as I have yet to find any Scottish connections, but by looking at this new information I can see that it is on my father's side, so maybe some help knowing that.

 

Thanks Peter that is very helpful I will keep that in mind. I haven't read about unexpected Scottish DNA, so I will have a look at that.

 

Did you expect a genuine example or a mock-up?

I'm not convinced it is at all accurate - for Chr 20 & 21 it is all Welsh for my father and "English/NW Europe" for my mother: all my "known" Welsh ancestry is through my maternal gt-grandmother. However, parts of north Somerset are included in the Ancestry "Welsh" region and I have paternal ancestors from that area ca. 1800!
For my mother's side there are 8 Chr all Welsh.
Whilst I have not found any ancestors outside England and Wales, I have a reason for accepting "Norway (paternal), Sweden & Denmark (maternal)" as the "ring finger" on both hands does not straighten due to Dupuytren's contracture ("Viking Finger") which is common in people with Northern European and Scandinavian ancestry.

 

I’m feeling deprived - I don’t have this additional new feature yet. However, I’m not sure how much help it will be when I do get it, as I have no idea which of my parents is which from their ethnicity breakdown.

 

I'm not sure if that example is real, or even possible, but it would have to be someone with a very disparate set of ancestors indeed. So it's never going to be similar to the picture for those of us whose ancestors are, as far as we know, all from the British Isles or even from western Europe.

 

I see it matches a "Darla Maclay" in the SideView introductory article!

 

My (Adopted) Dads DNA percentages are 50% Scottish from his Father and 7% Scottish, 39% England/NW Europe and 4% Germanic Europe from his Mother.
The Chromosome result shows all bands Scottish for his Father. The longest Chromosome for his Mothers side is Germanic Europe! Needless to say I haven't managed to trace any ancestry for her outside of England, so the Scottish is a mystery never mind the strongest ethnicity being Germanic Europe according to Ancestry Chromosomes!

 

I came across Ancestry's Beta Chromosome Painter and trying to make head or tail of it -to use my wife's Northamptonshire vernacular- 'it does my head in". Never the fastest kid off the block (things have to grow on me) and in my senior years the growth has slowed somewhat. So to what I want to say.

I found the Overview Ethnicity breakdown helpful and as the 'give away' to Parent 1 and Parent 2 was easy as I only have Irish ancestry on my paternal side; So Parent 1 is paternal. But in the 'Painter' -and leaving aside the Sweden&Denmark and Norway 'purplish' colour allocations - that really leaves 4 shades of 'GREEN-GREENISH BLUE' to distinguish between #England and Northwestern Europe; #Scotland; #Ireland and #Wales. Apart from bright green 'E&NWE the others I find hard to distinguish and it is no good asking my wife as she suffers a green-blue colour blindness anyway, but I now find myself in the same position.

There certainly are no multi-coloured lines (as in the Ancestry sample referred to by others) and so I will endeavour to make head and tail of what the Painter is trying to tell me, and what colours apply to what region. I may well stay with the Ethnicity breakdown which at least made some sense.

 

The colours Ancestry have given each of their population groups in Chromosome Painter don't seem to be fixed, which with 1500+ of them would be hard to do anyway. So, assuming they are picked just for your picture, to make it clearer, it's hard to see why they use such similar colours.

Fortunately there is a way to separate them: click on the names in the legend panel on the left and the colours will be turned on and off (greyed) accordingly.

I would also recommend looking at the ranges given for the groups' probabilities (or revisiting this). Click on each "ethnicity region" in the Ethnicity Estimate panel, to get the range. I think some here are believing too much of Ancestry's claims for this whole ethnicity thing, which is based on rather questionable assumptions, and seeing the ranges may calm that down a bit.

The numbers can still be a bit odd, of course. My 50% Scottish (all on my Dad's side) has a range of 34-50% - so they've picked a best estimate at one end of that range, for some reason. My England & Northwestern Europe figure of 43% becomes 35-56%, which looks plausible enough. But note that the small numbers have ranges almost that big, leading to a higher level of doubt for them.

So, I was a bit puzzled to see 6% Norwegian, and 1% Sweden & Denmark. Now I know the "Danes" who came to East Anglia were not all from Denmark, but I thought more were than were from Norway. The ranges I'm given for those are 0-15% Norway and 0-12% Sweden & Denmark. So anything or nothing, really.

 

That's wrong - there are actually 77 regions; the 1500+ applies to their "DNA communities". But even 77 distinct colours would be hard to come up with.