Ancestry Sideview Ethnicity Results - How Accurate?

I am interested to find out how accurate people think Ancestry's Sideview is, particularly with regard to ethnicity estimates. Is it to be taken with a pinch of salt?

While I am no DNA expert, I find Sideview's separation of paternal and maternal ethnicities rather hard to believe from a common-sense point-of-view.

Let me first say that in researching my family tree, I have found that my mother's ancestors and father's ancestors come from roughly the same region of the UK, mostly in the North West of England:

Paternal ancestors: Cheshire, South Lancashire and Shropshire
Maternal ancestors: Cheshire, South Lancashire and Northern Ireland

I'd say that my maternal family is more biased towards South Lancashire than my paternal family, which is more Cheshire-oriented.

My overall ethnicity results appear to be very typically English, but it is their separation to paternal and maternal by Sideview that concerns me.

Scotland
In my overall ethnicity results, I was surprised to see 18% Scotland but I believe this is not untypical for an English person. Ancestry say "on average, people native to England who take a DNA test see about 20% Scotland in their results". However, Sideview attributes all of my Scottish to my father's side. Surely, if the Scottish came from ancestors in the dim and distant past, it should be roughly equal on both sides, especially since my parents come from the same region of England.

Scandinavia
It's a similar story with my 6% Norway. Again, I understand this to be typical for an English person and have heard it described as "Viking residue". However, Sideview has attributed it purely to my mother's side. If it was Viking residue, I would expect it to be on both sides - for clarification, there are no obvious Norwegian ancestors in my family. I do, however, have Sweden & Denmark on both sides, 1% from my mother and 3% from my father.

Ireland
Another puzzle is my 4% Ireland. I know that I have Irish ancestors on my maternal side but Sideview has attributed it to my paternal side, with none on my maternal side. Could I be completely missing 6.25% of Irish ethnicity from a maternal great-great grandmother?

My main concern is that Scotland and Norway are polarised in my Sideview results, and I don't believe they should be if they come from the very distant past. Has anyone else observed similar effects in their results?

 

I know that it is not an exact science but I would like to know whether other people have noted similar results with the Sideview feature.

 

I have Northern Irish ancestry on my paternal side and that is reflected in Ancestry Sideview Ireland 12% and Scotland 41%
Ancestry's Scotland covers Northern Ireland, and my ancestors were Protestants, so I was assuming they came from Scotland originally, although I have no documentary evidence up to now.
My maternal side says 29% Scotland and again I have no documentary evidence for that either.
I have 2% Sweden and Denmark on my paternal side, which if I had to guess I would have put on my maternal side. So I was not expecting that.
England and NothWestern Europe only 4% on paternal side and 38% on maternal side. I would have expected that to be more even.

 

DNA never lies however ethnicity estimates are just estimates based on all the other people who have taken a test. You don’t say if you have matches to known paternal & maternal cousins and if so, they have been placed on the correct side of the family. With adoption you have to tell the system whether Parent1 or Parent2 is Maternal. I say Maternal because generally it’s the mother who is known via original birth certificate.

 

Thanks for your response, Katie.

I hadn't noticed that Ancestry's Scotland covers a part of Northern Ireland, but now I see it. I believe that my maternal Northern Irish ancestors were Catholic, so does that mean they probably didn't migrate from Scotland? In any case, Sideview has the Scottish and Irish on my paternal side, on which I know of no such ancestors.

 

Yes, I do have DNA cousin matches to known sides and Sideview has largely assigned them to the correct side, although I currently have a large Unassigned group, like most people (in some cases, the side they belong to is very obvious to me). There is a branch of my tree where some of my paternal cousins have been assigned to the maternal side and I can't see any obvious way that there has been cross-over between the two sides. However, Sideview is supposed to be at least 95% correct for 90% of people, so the anomalies may be within the margin of error.

By the way, I wasn't disputing that ethnicity estimates are estimates. I was questioning whether Sideview actually gives sensible results when applied to ethnicity and wanted to know whether other people were seeing the same polarisation effects as me for supposed distant ancestors.

A related issue is the Chromosome Painter. Here, I have mostly chromosomes of solid ethnicity, including whole chromosomes of Scotland, Norway and Sweden & Denmark. Ancestry say:

"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."

So, I would expect to see fragmented chromosomes containing multiple ethnicities from my distant Scottish and Viking ancestors. At most, I have two ethnicities in one chromosome.

 

The word "expect" is used a lot in this thread, about what Ancestry calls "ethnicity". I reckon most people are basing what they expect on very optimistic assumptions, and forgetting how much randomness is involved in all our DNA. Even if whatever Ancestry's processing responds to is something like the historical/geographic identities that the ethnicity labels suggest (and I doubt it is), an individual's DNA will not in most cases match that closely. And here is an illustration of this.

A few weeks ago Ancestry sent out some e-mails pushing their new "DNA compare" feature. (There is a "Compare my DNA" button in the Ethnicity estimate box.) One thing you can do with this is a direct side-by-side comparison of the ethnicity figures for two siblings among your DNA matches. Of course you may need to do a bit of work to find out who are siblings, since they won't often say so explicitly. They and their parents will usually be living now or recently, and only limited details may be given. But with luck you'll find a few examples. Here's one from my matches.

These two brothers have a Polish father and a mother who was herself half English and at least a quarter Scottish in terms of recent family. Since she was from Durham, the Scottish component of her ancestry could be much higher. That explains the major features of these two sets of figures. But they don't correspond exactly to the "expected" figures of 50%, 12% etc. And I don't think you should expect them to either. These are two random fluctuations around a trend, and that's all you'll ever get. Of course your pair of siblings may match closer than these, or be even more different. But I expect this is typical.

 

Good points Stuart. The thought occurs to me that in the above example the actual amount of 'Scotland' DNA in cM may actually be the same. But the percentage gets skewed by the right hand sibling having more English, Sweden and Eastern European. In the right hand example 12% less Scotland but 9% + 8% =17% more English & Sweden.

 

A set of 3 siblings amongst my matches show differences between them, but they are less stark than those of Peter's cousins.

 

Sorry CliveR I do not know the answer. I understood that they were mainly protestant faiths that moved to Ulster from the 1600s onwards.

 

These are the ethnicity results for me and my sister.
The only strange thing is that all the Irish for me is on my paternal side and all the Irish for my sister is on her maternal side.
As Peter says

 

That's all very interesting and helps to demonstrate the randomness of inherited DNA and perhaps the flakiness of ethnicity estimates. My sister's DNA sample is currently being processed, so it will be interesting to see how hers compares with mine.

Ancestry also have 'DNA communities'. Although I know that I have great-great-grandparents from Shropshire on one side and from Northern Ireland on the other side, neither of these regions feature in my communities. They don't feature for my first cousin and relevant second cousins from the respective sides either.

The above discussion relates to ethnicity estimates in general and was a bit of a deviation from my initial question about Sideview. If, for a moment, we accept our overall ethnicity estimate as it is, do we think Sideview does a reasonable job, particularly with respect to distant ancestors such as the Vikings? It would be interesting to see some screenshots of people's Sideview breakdowns. I have only seen my own, as Ancestry doesn't give access to other people's Sideview results.

 

I am not advocating Sideview. The nature of my post is to question how successfully it achieves its aim (at this Beta stage) in relation to paternal/maternal ethnicity breakdown. My view is it probably doesn't do it very successfully, but I was hoping to learn about other people's results and views on the matter.

 

OK, it sounds like you've decided that this is the end of my discussion (for now).