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.
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ReplyDeleteMy recommendation for people interested in autosomal ancestry analyses: pay money to the major direct-to-consumer autosomal genetic testing companies only for acquiring autosomal raw data and, if there are, for their individual genetic match functions and genetics-based health and trait tests, do not pay much attention to the autosomal ancestry analyses of those companies, then upload the autosomal raw data you acquire to much better and much cheaper or free autosomal ancestry services like Global25 and GEDmatch and, if you are a professional or have a professional friend, also analyze them using formal test methods offered by various genetic analysis software.
ReplyDeletePaper trails are good, but unfortunately there is not much chance for tracing ancestry back several centuries for people of most countries or cultures, and paper trails, no matter how far back they go, never give you the opportunity to make genetic comparisons between populations and random individuals.