Mother's Day 2020 - Quarantine Edition

Hey guys!

Since I am unable to spend my time with my Mom this Mother’s Day, I decided to to write a post about DNA and Genealogy, something I know she also enjoys. A few years ago I did both the Ancestry DNA and 23andMe. Both tests use saliva to obtain your DNA… but as you will see, results may differ.

23andMe

You can see 23andMe shows all of my tested populations. With British and Irish, German and Italian being the strongest, 98.3% European leaves 1.7% Western Asia and North African. I figured I would have a lot of British because of my surname, Walker. Irish was a bit of a surprise until after researching, I found out that my paternal great-grandmother’s surname was Mallernee. I thought I may have a little German since my maternal great-grandmothers surname was Ortman. Since my grandmothers on each side were Italian, seeing that didn’t surprise me. Greek and Balkan came out of nowhere, as did the Arab, Egyptian and Levantine… That just made me think, no wonder I’ve always been fascinated with Ancient Egypt. :)

Ancestry

Here is where things get very different. As you can see, Ancestry has me with only 3% Italian and 23andMe has me with 25.2%. 23andMe has me with 23.8% French & German, which turned out to be just 2 regions in Germany. And Ancestry has me with 25% France and 9% Germanic. It’s quite confusing because they don’t match up.

All in all, I really did enjoy seeing the results. Because Italian Language was my major in College I was super happy to see that I’m 1/4 Italian. So because 23andMe has me with that percentage, I tend to go off of their results. Hopefully one day with all of the updates they both do they will actually have more similar results so I know what I truly am.

Let me know in the comments if you have done either of these tests or even a different one.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you Mother’s out there :)

XX

Jenn