Question

i have 43% italian my daughter has 9% how could that be???

Comments

Because genes only vaguely map to geographical countries and companies only use a few markers anyway which are generally inaccurate. As long as she shares around half your DNA then she's your daughter.

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Basically, you're just another case study in how inaccurate the ethnicity percentages can be. This is pretty typical, from what I've seen - they are not to be taken all that seriously.

That being said, your DNA matches are QUITE accurate. Anybody coming in as "good confidence" or better on AncestryDNA is practically guaranteed to be some distant relation (that's well into their "Distant Cousins" category). Presumably, your daughter is at the top of the list of your matches, with something around 1760 cM. OTHERWISE, you got something to worry about!

Answer 1

she shares near enough to 50% of your dna, but it is shuffled up and random assuming that her other parent is not Italian, on random,  one might expect  she would have half of your 43% Italian ie 23 and 1/2 %. But this only an average, if you managed to have a 100 children this would be close to the average, but she could have inherited all 43% or none at all, getting most of the other 57% instead. She ended up with 9%. Besides I think these tests for different ethnic groups are a little flaky

Comments

I've also seen comments made that Ancestry DNA isn't as good at estimating Italian DNA as they are some other ethnicities, like English, or Ashkenazi Jewish. I'm not sure if that's true, but I have seen people make such statements.

Answer 2

Imagine genes like a deck of cards.  Lets say you get 26 black cards from your father and 26 red from your mother.  When your daughter is born, she gets 1/2 of her cards from you and 1/2 from her father.  Lets say the father has blue and green cards.  She could get 26 green cards and no blue, or 13 of each.  

Lets assume that the Italian genes are the red cards.  She could draw 23 red cards and no black cards or 23 black cards and no red cards, or some combination in between.  If she drew all read, she would have 43% Italian, if she drew no red, she would have 0% Italian.

Theoretically, lets say your mothers parents are one Chinese and one Italian and your father's parents are the same.  It is possible that you could have 100% Chinese DNA or 100% Italian DNA if you inherited through your father the genes of only one of his parents, and through through your mother the same.

Hope that makes sense.