Question

How accurate would you say is the Gedmatch admixture by chromosome? Showed some traces of American Indian.

Answer 1

I'm about as far from a pro as can be when it comes to DNA/GEDmatch questions, but History Chick's post from her blog "Genealogical Musings" (http://genealogical-musings.blogspot.com/2017/04/finally-gedmatch-admixture-guide.html) answered a lot of questions for me.

Comments

Thank you for the information. I've always been told that I have Native American ancestry on my mother's side and so I took the autosomal test from family tree DNA just to see what was what. 90% European and a surprising 5% African. But no Native American, or too little too pick up. After downloading my raw DNA to gedmatch, it showed some Native American traces on multiple chromosomes, and 100% on the 14th. Now I'm looking for a way to settle this question once and for all.

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23andMe is generally considered to have the most accurate ethnic admixture results. I would test with them and see what they say. Native American and Asian (specifically the native peoples of Siberia) DNA can look very similar, so sometimes people get false positives for trace amounts of NA when it's actually remote Siberian ancestry (from, say, the Mongol invasions of Europe) or vice versa.

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You will still need to do the paper trail to prove anything. Without it it is still speculation. Traces of NA aren't particularly meaningful. The large amount on one chromosome could be meaningful so may mean it is worth looking further in the paper trail.

Answer 2

All ethnicity calculations are estimates. They are based on comparison with reference populations which were initially small and will be refined over time. Gedmatch offers many admixture calculation methods so you will get varying results as you choose different ones.

Comments

So the Native American might just be noise?