Mike and I recently had our autosomal DNA tested by Ancestry.com in the hope of either substantiating or laying to rest various family legends on both sides (royalty, mysterious grannies, etc.), and maybe eventually filling in some blanks in the family tree where conventional genealogy research had run into cads who rudely didn’t leave their names after leaving their lady friend with child.
This test has been offered in US for several years, but has only recently been made available in the UK and Ireland. We received our test kits pretty quickly (they appeared to have been dispatched from central Dublin, so they did not have far to come!). As directed, we refrained from food and drink for a period of time before completing the test (I guess so we wouldn’t contaminate the sample and show up as a weird human/food hybrid). The test itself involved spitting into a test tube, which was was surprisingly hard to fill up – the last third took almost as much time as the two-thirds before it. We mailed off our samples and several weeks later the results were available on the Ancestry website.
My test was pretty much exactly what you would expect, with my ethnicity estimate being 55% Finland/Northwest Russia and 44% Eastern Europe. About 1% was possibly from the Caucasus but it was only estimated as the percentage was so low. Given that my parents are Finnish on one side and Ukrainian/Russian on the other side going back many generations, it was not much of a surprise.
Mike’s results were a bit more interesting. We knew his ancestors were quite thoroughly English going back as far as I could trace, but we knew there was a possibility of a non-English region showing up in the results, as there are two theories within the family about the Goldhawk branch of his family: that they might have been European Jews (Mike’s father’s theory) or that they may have been Huguenots (my theory).While Mike’s results contained a typically British mix of Western Europe (41%), Great Britain (36%), Scandinavia (11%) and Ireland (5%), the proportions were more heavily weighted towards Western Europe than is most typical for people from England. This might lend credence to the theory that the Goldhawks might have been Huguenot in origin, as a more recent migration from the continent on that side of the family may contribute towards the greater Western European component. His sample also had about 7% of DNA that was estimated, with the suggestions being the Iberian Peninsula (5%), Eastern Europe (1%) and Finland/Northwest Russia (1%), but as these are only estimates, it is entirely possible that Mike does not have ancestors from those regions.
Another feature of doing the the Ancestry.com DNA test is that it matches you with probable relations who have accounts on that website and have also taken the test (mostly distant cousins). Both Mike and I have many distant cousin matches (probably on both sides for Mike and more on the maternal side for me). Since until recently the test has been only available in America, the matches tend to be from the US, but as more people from the UK take the test we might discover closer cousins for Mike. We’ve added our results to GedMatch to compare them with other results from across the world. Eventually we might do another autosomal DNA test from a different company to compare with the Ancestry.com test, and we might also try doing a Y-DNA test (Mike) and an mtDNA test (me) to find out our DNA haplogroups.
I had a similar analysis done by ‘Britain’s DNA’ some time ago, but all that it showed up (apart from some components that were either indeterminate or probably too small to be statistically meaningful) was an overwhelmingly ‘British’ ancestry. Your analyses seem to indicate that these tests may have become a little more refined since mine was done, but Britain’s DNA haven’t offered an updated version yet. There was a complicated story in my mother’s family that began with an alleged Huguenot connection, but most of the story turned out to be related to a notorious Victorian hoax (The Mobbs Millions) and I suspect that the Huguenot ancestry was invented by someone with a vested interest (ie a dishonest, or at least imaginative ‘genealogist’) in helping my maternal great-grandfather prove his claim to a share of the equally mythical ‘millions’. Curiously enough I think that I have successfully traced my Mobbs line back to rural Buckinghamshire, just across the border from the tiny Oxfordshire village where the story located their Huguenot forebears, but at that point the trail goes very cold indeed. There are lists of Huguenot family names on the internet but neither Mobbs nor the supposed ancestral ‘de Mobbes’ is there.