Ancestry.com ethnicity updates have been increasing more accurate

My compliments to Ancestry.com on its latest ethnicity updates. The company has come a long way from the time in 2018 when it said my siblings and cousins were more French than Italian. Each update since then has come with more detail, and, despite a few rabbit trails in the wrong direction, increasing accuracy.

I can say accuracy with some authority, because I have traced my genealogy extensively, taking some of my Tuscan lines back some 1,000 years, and the area where my family came from was not near a seaport or major trading route. The families there did not marry outside of their own community, and I can verify that with documented research.

I’ve traced Nonno’s Spadoni ancestors back to the mid-1400s and Nonna’s Seghieri line to the mid-1200s (and there were people with that unusual surname living in Pisa hundreds of years before that). Nonno and Nonna had seven children, and each of them married a non-Italian (except for one who did not marry at all). Thus, my siblings, cousins and I are all about 50 percent Tuscan.

I can accept that people from Tuscany will have some genes from other places, so I can’t complain that the six of us who have tested with Ancestry come out between 40-49 percent Italian. The remaining percentage is a mixture of a little French, a little Spanish, and slightly more “Southern Germanic European.” The latter makes perfect sense, as the Lombards (Longobardi) invaded and conquered Tuscany and ruled from about 570 to 774, with headquarters in nearby Lucca. This mostly Germanic tribe was noted for assimilating with the people they conquered, so it’s quite likely that many Tuscans have DNA mixed with Longobardi. In fact, the name Seghieri is of Germanic-Longobardo origin, as are the names of nearby cities Pescia, Uzzano and Altopascio.

Another attestation of the accuracy of the new algorithms is that my sister, brother and I all show up as sharing 25 percent Dutch ancestry, which is spot on. Our grandmother Jeannette Esveldt has a line we’ve traced back to just south of Amsterdam in the year 1630. There is even a town named Esveld in The Netherlands, so it’s quite likely a much older name. She would have been considered 100 percent Dutch, or nearly so, making us one quarter Dutch, as Ancestry confirms. The other one quarter of our heritage, from my mom’s father, is primarily a mixture of English and German, which gives us small percentages of DNA from Southern England, Wales, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Brittany.

All in all, I’m pleased with how the DNA results match up with my paper trail research. I had written highly critical blogs in 2016 and 2018, scolding Ancestry for misleading people about their origins. I also expressed hope that as more data became available, the formulas would become more accurate. Now it’s time to praise the social scientists at Ancestry for a job well done. Siete grandi! Grazie!

Added note: Another great feature that Ancestry added a few years ago is the ability to differentiate between the DNA inherited from father and mother. I can’t explain the science behind this, but it is also amazingly accurate: