Ancestry DNA

I mentioned to my husband last November that I had some interest in contributing a saliva sample to AncestryDNA. The kits were on sale in December so he bought one for me for Christmas instead.

The first week of January I filled the tube with saliva. The tube has a little funnel insert , and it really isn't that much spit to fill it. The lid has a preservative built in so that when you screw it shut you see a light blue color in the tube. You have to register the bar code of the kit on your Ancestry account (which my husband had to set up to purchase the kit). The box, the tube, the documentation all have matching bar codes.

They said it could take 6-8 weeks to get the results. Mine came in about 3 weeks.

I was expecting Dutch, German, and British ethnicity. The results were 73% Great Britain, 9% Europe West. The Netherlands and Germany are included in the Europe West category, and Ancestry did not break it down into individual countries for me. I would have liked that.

The surprise was 10% Scandinavian. I don't know of any Scandinavian ancestors. However, under each category there is a very brief "history". Of course the Vikings did a lot of marauding including Great Britain. The information also mentioned that in the 17th and 18th century 80,000 Norwegians emigrated to the Netherlands. (My great-great grandparents came to the U.S. in the 1800s after the Civil War.) So perhaps those two factors account for the 10%.

The rest of the percentages were under what Ancestry calls Low Confidence Regions: 4% Caucasus; 3% Europe East; less than 1% European Jewish; less than 1% Europe South.  

You can allow Ancestry to provide possible relatives in their data base, including those you may not know about. You can get in touch with these people. I chose not to do this. I really didn't want people contacting me, and I had no interest in contacting them. I was just curious after all of the commercials if there would be a surprise in the ethnicity of my ancestors. There was the Scandinavian surprise. I wonder how many people with British and Dutch ancestry have this trace of Scandinavian. I am thinking it may be rather common. 

I guess validating my ethnicity was worth $69. One side benefit was that I have been emailing some distant relatives in Northern California, and one of them has an extensive family tree on Ancestry and invited me to have viewing privileges. To do that I would have had to create an account, but since I already have one, I just signed in.

You do get a lot of email from Ancestry  the first month after submitting the kit, trying to get you to join Ancestry with a monthly fee but a free 30-day trial.  Now that I can see a tree which is much bigger than what includes my branch of the family, I think I have the information of common early ancestors that interests me without all of the work and expense.