What's the weirdest DNA result you have received?

Question

I have had my DNA testing done with 3 different companies; Ancestry, 23andMe, CRI Genetics.

The first two were fairly standard, still not sure how to use the information to work more on my tree, but learning.  

My question to WikiTreers, have any of you others done the CRI testing and come across anything that you might consider weird, strange, or unusual?  I certainly did!  

I understand the basics of DNA and how it works, but the results from CRI were weird.  I live in Washington State, both sides of my family came from Britain and Western Europe.  The results from CRI says that I have ancestors from Sri Lanka, Gujarati India, Peru, Columbia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.  This makes me very confused.

Comments

My Y-DNA test results are very unusual. The Y-37 test revealed six zeros. The Y-67 test had 14 zeros, adding 8 more. I have since taken the Y-111 and Big Y-700 test that revealed five more for a total of 19 deletions.  The results have been verified to be genuine. The Multiple Deletion Project was created and now has 25 others with the same deletions in the same location. Multiple surnames are involved.  The Big Y-700 test has assigned my Termial SNP at FT225572. One gentleman and myself have a GD of 7 in the Y-111. We have a SNP match at FT32969.

This was a huge deletion! I created a spreadsheet of the results.  It revealed an actual deletion of over 2 million base  pairs. The Big Y reveals that the event occurred over 1,000 years BP.

The Negative: Receive very few matches above 12.

The Positive: Able to identify surnames who have a common ancestral connection.

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I took the Y-37 test originally. With an Elliott surname from the British Isles I was certain I would get the WAMH model haplogroup of a typical Celt origine, (R1b/R-M269) and match the other main branch of Elliotts in the FTDNA project. Instead I got a result of E-M35/E-M81, which is called the Berber marker feom North Africa. What? My Elliott line traces back to at least 1700s New England. I only match about 1% of Elliotts in the project. I've since learned that most surnames were not adopted until around the 1200 to 1300s. Still an unusual result. If there was some sort of NPE it was a long time ago at least.

Answer 1

My first ethnicity admixture result from FT DNA was a weird one. It said 22% Eastern Europe.

Now at the time we were still looking for my mothers then unknown Biological father so I figured that maybe he was of East european ancestry. To verify this, there had been some immigration into NZ from east europe - mostly around the time of WW1 - after the Austro-hungarian Empire had been broken up.. So it was plausible.

I also had a match to a lady at FT DNA but we could not for the life of us, figure out who the MRCA was!!!

So I uploaded my DNA to my Heritage and a whole different ethnicity breakdown showed up. This one had something like 2% Eastern Europe but 22% Scandinavian!!

My Heritage also had a link to a man who was possibly a first cousin to my mother (1C1R to me).  And what do you know? He had the same couple MCRA that the lady at FT DNA had.

And because he was a 1C1R, we figured out that one of his uncles was my grandfather. There were 3 uncles (brothers) in the family. The missing MCRA couple turned out to be Irish,  not East European.

As of 2020, it still has not been determined which one of the 3 brothers was my grandfather but I have made an educated guess.

So now i only use the My Heritage ethnicity estimate  breakdown as I believe that one to be much more accurate than the ethnicity estimate I received from FT DNA.

The increased Scandinavian ethnicity comes from my Orkney ancestors....

Answer 2

When you get your DNA test results back, you get two different results.

One is a conversion of data from our autosomal chromosomes into a string of letters (A, C, G, T) representing the state of the genes on each of your chromosomes. This data can be used to compare to other people, to determine if you are related and can be used to compare with known mutations associated with disease. This data is accurate, factual and does not lie.

The other result is your ethnicity estimate, or admixture. The results are based on the company's proprietary algorithms run against your DNA and a set of other people in that company's database that have self-identified their ethic background. This is purely done for entertainment purposes.

So, getting weird admixture results at any given company, or trying to compare results between companies, is a bit fraught.

There are some interesting stories about there about identical twins that have done DNA testing at the same company and compared their admixture results and their ethnicity estimates did not match. It's all par for the course for that aspect of commercial DNA testing.

All that said, I found out through comparing my father's DNA with his matches that his mother's father was not the man she grew up with. Her biological father was the son of an Irish immigrant (to the US). My father is essentially 25% Irish. None of the companies show any Irish in his admixture results, even though he has matches with lots of people in Ireland. *shrug*

You definitely can't take the admixture part of the service to seriously! :)

Answer 3

Couldn't agree with Allison more on this. My admixture results vary significantly from company to company and between me and my sister. This is not really surprising when you understand how they are generated, still far from settled science at this point.

That said, they can still be of some limited genealogical value. My sister tested first at Ancestry and got significant amounts of unexpected Scandinavian and Irish in her admixture. At the time we did not know the identity or ethnicity of our paternal grandfather and so made the assumption that this was from him. I'm not so sure I'd still make this assumption knowing what I do now, but it turned out to be spot on. About two years later, with the help of a very fortunate match at MyHeritage, I was able to determine the parents of my paternal grandfather. His father's parents were both Irish and his mother had immigrated to the US from Norway. As they say though, your results may vary.

The real genealogical value in your DNA test results is in your matches and to get the full use of them I highly recommend uploading your results to MyHeritage, FTDNA and GEDmatch. Ancestry is great for close relations but does not provide the tools necessary to work on most more distant relations. I'd recommend starting out with 2nd or 3rd cousins and going through the DNA Confirmation process here on Wikitree. Once you've got a few ancestors confirmed with DNA then you can get into the real fun of working your way back further in your tree using segment level data based on known connections. Good luck!

Answer 4

I did find a second cousin who turned out to have been conceived via sperm donation. It seems his biological father is my father's first cousin.