This blog post responds to the ethnicity estimates on Ancestry as did my last blog post. This one is more eloquent. 🙂
[One quick note: As always, we receive no financial benefit or consideration for any product or service we review/recommend/discuss here. Everything we discuss is our opinion alone, and we talk about it because we use it.]
Ancestry has made a lot of noise recently when they updated their Ethnicity estimates, and the now intensified debate about the “accuracy of DNA tests” and the confusion among the general public makes it clear: as a community of serious researchers, we need to be the voice of reason when it comes genetic admixture and call it out for dubiously valuable, largely inaccurate parlor trick that it is. Here’s why:
Ethnicity cannot be tested for. Ever.
Ethnicity is a social construct. Period. If we look at any test, any genealogical tree or other determination it will not build a social link to ones ancestral background. Michael hasn’t been to Ireland, but I have, and…
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The Family Kalamazoo 
Thank You for posting this.
You’re welcome! 🙂
Amen!
Sent from my iPad
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Yup!
Yes—as you know, I agree. Nothing but a big marketing ploy. But people will be duped into testing anyway. And maybe others will then find them as matches. But, of course, those people won’t have trees and won’t respond to requests for information because they only took the test for the ethnicity analysis.
It also kills me when I see on FB that someone tested with 2% Ashkenazi Jewish background and that now they are searching for their Jewish ancestor. I mean—really?? I tested with some tiny percentage of Italian background on one of the tests. Maybe that explains why I love pasta so much? 🙂
LOL! I know. I see that sometimes on Tracing the Tribe. Huh, really? You make a good point–a lot of the people who test for the ethnicity don’t have trees. Their $50 or 100 has been wasted.
For them and for us!
The real tell is when you test with more than one company (I have) and the ethnicity estimates look like they came from completely different people. I mean, how scientific can they possibly be?
Pancho, isn’t that hilarious? Ridiculous.
Although I agree in the main, for family historians, the “ethnicity” result can sometimes be of help. I recently tested with Amazon and was amazed to be told my background is 30% Scots. Now my paper research had produced a 95% southern English result, although I have an “unknown” grandfather. This pointed me in the direction of chasing those matches who had Scottish ancestry – not surprisingly these represented a large proportion of my matches from various sites. No firm results yet, but it shows the ethnicity element isn’t wholly useless.