Lawks - a Mercian!

[steepholm]

Well, my DNA test results are in, and although they hold no radical surprises it's certainly very interesting to see my genes spread across the map like iron filings and clustering around certain magnetic poles.



I do find some of this hard to parse, though. It turns out I'm 37% from Great Britain, and especially from "Wales and the West Midlands", but a different 26% of me is from "Ireland/Scotland/Wales". So does that make doubly Welsh? Or Welsh in more than one way? I really can't say.

But the "Wales and West Midlands" sounds right: I have plenty of known ancestors both east and west of the border, although this of course is but the iceberg tip of the genetic story: the Butlers hail from Claines in Worcestershire, and my mother's family is scattered either side of the border in such places as Wellington, Wrexham, Ruthin and Chester.

As for the rest, I've more continental ancestry than I expected, considering that the nearest I've been able to trace is eight generations back and should thus account for less than 1% of my genes, but then I've not been able to follow every forking path, or anything like it.

Finland, Northwest Russia and the snowy Caucasus may account for less than 3% of the whole, but they provide a welcome note of exoticism in what is otherwise a predictably Western European story.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Well, speaking as a resident of Mercia.....

I have ancestry in the region too although as you know, my ancestry is complex!

[steepholm]

Indeed - I'm much more of a stay-at-home!

[thistleingrey]

Might Ir/Scot/W pick up either Norman-era movement (which I'd pull at least into C17, though my mind went first to Gerald of Wales) or the part of the continuum that goes with this?

[steepholm]

When I clock on Ir/Scot/W, I get this explanation from Ancestry.com:

Ireland’s modern culture remains deeply rooted in the Celtic culture that spread across much of Central Europe and into the British Isles. Along with Wales, Scotland, and a handful of other isolated communities within the British Isles, Ireland remains one of the last holdouts of the ancient Celtic languages that were once spoken throughout much of Western Europe. And though closely tied to Great Britain, both geographically and historically, the Irish have fiercely maintained their unique character through the centuries.

I suspect the Ireland-heavy nature of this paragraph betrays the company's American origins, but the overall message appears to be that "Ir/Scot/W" = Celtic. What this means for the "Great Britain" category I'm not sure, but if they're that focused on Ireland I suppose they may not have noticed that the majority of Celts in these islands live in Great Britain, not Ireland.

[thistleingrey]

That quotation is disappointing. Thanks for providing it, though!

Indeed--I wonder how they categorize people of Cornish and Manx descent, then.

[steepholm]

And let's not even start on the Bretons...