It seems that, for many people, when considering DNA testing, it is the 'ethnicity' that they are mainly interested in - how "English" they are, or whether they are a "Viking", or a 'native' to whichever country they live in. I remember when I first received my Ancestry results, and contacted my closest match - they hadn't even realised that they would be able to find other people who were genetically related to them.
Whereas, for me, it has always been the DNA matching that was important, in order to confirm (or disprove!) my family history research. I think that's one advantage of being in a family history organisation like the Guild of One-Name Studies - there have usually been 'pioneers' in any aspect of the research, people who have already gone on ahead and have fed back some of the pros and cons they've discovered.
And so I was aware that, for the ethnicity estimates, the clue is in the name - these are 'estimates', and they depend very much on which reference populations the companies are using. That didn't mean I took no notice of them - I just took them 'with a pinch of salt', especially when one company, MyHeritage, indicated that I had no English DNA.
Several of the companies included the UK as part of a general "Northern Europe" grouping, so I hadn't actually noticed at first glance - the following is from a screenshot I took in 2017:
I think one often doesn't notice when something is 'missing', only when it's there but doesn't 'fit'. So it was only when I explored the maps and figures in more detail that I realised the estimate was showing me as having no English:
This was rather strange, considering that, with the exception of one 5xgreat grandfather (a German, who was in England by 1802), every one of my identified ancestral lines is either in England, or in the South Wales border area!
Since these results seemed so far 'off', I haven't paid much attention to the ethnicity estimates at MyHeritage over the years.
But the companies are always refining these reference populations and MyHeritage has recently released a new update, version 2.5. You can see their blog post about it at https://blog.myheritage.com/2025/02/introducing-ethnicity-estimate-v2-5-improved-dna-ethnicity-model/
I hadn't actually noticed that my initial results, which were from when the ethnicity estimates were still described as "Beta", had been refined slightly, at some stage, by version 0.95:
That had brought in some English, at 3%, with hints of several genetic groups from specific areas within England.
But now, with this latest update, the estimate has changed considerably and is much more in accordance with my known ancestry:
Even the "Germanic" is now showing up!
The above results all come from the same DNA test that I originally transferred to MyHeritage, so it is not that my DNA has changed in any way. What has changed is the method by which MyHeritage are analysing it, along with their updated reference populations.
As Roberta Estes states in her blog about the update, "the whole purpose of updating ethnicity results is to obtain either more granular results, or more accurate results, or both." 1
In my case, the update definitely seems to have produced both!
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