Monday, October 18, 2021

European IBD statistics

 Many online genetic services provide individual  ancestry results but don't reveal their methods.  For me 9 of 10 services give Finnish plus minor 5-8% admixture of Greek or Italian.  I have seen a man of fully Croat ancestry getting additionally 12 % Orcadian ancestry.  Surprising Orcadian in Balkans, really? Only to mention two examples. Those ancestry testing companies looks like modern alchemists.  My advice is, don't pay, you can get ancestry tests for free from services using open source softwares.   Maybe results of open source softwares are not perfect, but at least you have a possibility to find out how the results are done. 

It is obvious that these companies use a special data adaptation and model putative ancestral pools to geographical locations according their own approaches, but they are not professional historians.  Maybe there is seen a growing genealogical demand in countries where the paper trail is incomplete or they simply try to give a shortcut bypassing paper trail, but according my experience there is no substitute for the old fashion genealogy work.  I am not going to start searching my Italian cousins, because  my paper trail, fully covering to the end of the 17th century, doesn't show Italian roots.