Ancestry DNA chromosome painter

[Sue700]

This has inspired me to have a look.
From Parent 1: 49% Wales, 1% Ireland.
From Parent 2: 34% Wales, 9% Ireland, 5% Germanic Europe, 2% Scotland.
I don't know for sure which parent is which.
All my mother's known ancestors were Welsh. Maybe she is parent 1. A bit of overlap between Wales and Ireland seems plausible.
My father had 3 grandparents with all Welsh ancestors and one with all English ancestors as far as I can tell. If he is parent 2 then the Welsh component is remarkably good, considering that I would have inherited a random half of his DNA, but I would have expected some English.
The new Chromosome Painter feature shows most of my chromosomes as completely Welsh, but three are completely Irish and two are mixed Welsh/Irish, two are completely Germanic Europe and one is completely Scottish. I think that I would have expected them to be a bit more mixed if these ethnicities are genuine - which they perhaps aren't, particularly the Scottish.
Both parents died a long time ago and none of my close relations are willing to test. I don't think that I can take this any further.
Matches with more distant but known cousins confirm that my father and grandfathers really were my father and grandfathers, however some of these matches are on MyHeritage or 23andMe.
All this is quite fun, but I don't imagine that it will give me any real help.

 

[peter]

My father had 3 grandparents with all Welsh ancestors and one with all English ancestors as far as I can tell. If he is parent 2 then the Welsh component is remarkably good, considering that I would have inherited a random half of his DNA, but I would have expected some English.

It's not just that you have inherited a random half of your father's DNA, he would also have inherited a random half of his parents' DNA, so there were two opportunities to lose the English component. Also it's unlikely that your 'English' great-grandparent would be identified as 100% English were their DNA available for testing - see the earlier comments about the Scottish component.

All this is quite fun, but I don't imagine that it will give me any real help.

That's always been the problem with ethnicity estimates - the chance of them telling an experienced family historian anything useful is small. However, as we all know, about 80% of people who take a DNA test aren't experienced family historians - for them it is the first step in the journey (but hopefully not the last step).

However I'm hopeful that this latest development is just a step in Ancestry's journey towards telling us more about our matches - time will tell.