DNA ETHNICITY Explained
DNA testing has now become an integral part of family history research. For genealogy purposes it’s the list of cousin matches that is the most important part of the test, but all of the companies also provide a biogeographical ancestry report where they try to assign our DNA to different countries or regions of the world. These reports are becoming increasingly granular in nature. They can sometimes help to inform your research, and will occasionally lead to surprise discoveries.
HOW DO COMPANIES CALCULATE YOUR ETHNICITY?
‘It is now possible to get quite granular results for people of European ancestry’
Each company tries to put together a panel of reference populations. These are modern individuals who are deemed to be representative of a particular country, region or population. The samples are collected either from publicly available research projects or from the companies’ own databases. The research samples are taken from projects such as the 1000 Genomes Project, the Human Genome Diversity Project, the Simons Genome Diversity Project, the Asian Diversity Project and the
