One of the most popular videos we have has to do with ethnicity and how far back an ancestor is
based on their ethnicity. Well that video needs an update based on some comments that we have.
Howdy, I'm Andy Lee with Family History Fanatics and today we're going to talk about multiple
ancestors. Now, in the previous video what I looked at was, if you had 3% of some ethnicity and
no other indication how far back could you look to find that possible ancestor? We looked at
this chart here and you can see that starting out it goes as a percentage from 50% to 25%,
12.5%. Basically half in each time. And these are just the averages. And so around 3% would
be at about your third great-grandparent level. But there were some other caveats
in the video. You'll have to go back and watch it. One of the most common comments that I got
from that video was, "what if it's actually two different ancestors? Or three? Or four different
ancestors that were contributing to that one ethnic group that's showing up on your results?"
Let's update this video and say how far back are multiple ancestors based on an
ethnicity percentage? Now, the reason why I did not go over this in the original video is
because it gets a little complicated. Let's make it easy on ourselves and start off with just 3%.
Let's say that you have 3% of some ethnicity that is not really represented anywhere else
with your ancestry. As far as you know, there's just this percentage. How far back could that be?
Now, we answered that question in the first video if we were looking at just one
ancestor. What about if we're looking at multiple ancestors? Well, with one ancestor you just have 1
third great-grandparent would equal about 3%. If you go back another generation, you get 2 fourth
great-grandparents that would equal about 1.6% each, so about 3%. Go back another generation,
you have 4 fifth great-grandparents. Each one contributes about 0.8%, which is about 3% overall.
And if you went back another generation, you could have 8 sixth great-grandparents. Each contributing
just a small 0.4%m but it adds up to 3%. Go and take a look at what this would
actually look like from your family tree. So here we have a fan chart. Starting at the bottom
there's parents, and then grandparents, your first great-grandparents, second
great-grandparents, third great-grandparents, fourth great-grandparents. You noticed I didn't
have room to put fifth and sixth and seventh great-grandparents on there. But each shell of
this fan chart doubles the number of people. So you see how many people here are on the fourth
great-grandparents. There's twice as many on the fifth great-grandparents and twice as many as that
on the sixth great-grandparents. If we're talking 1 third great-grandparent, then this might be the
closest person that was fully Ashkenazi Jewish in your family tree. Notice there is a lot of people
in that third great-grandparent region and only one of them is that. Let's say everybody else was
English or Irish and this one person was Ashkenazi Jewish. If we go to the next generation,
fourth great-grandparents, we could have 2 that make it add up to that 3%. And you can see
they don't have to be obviously close to each other as far as on that tree. They can be pretty
widespread apart, but you just have 2 of them and you get 3%. And that's the easy part of
two people. What if we did multiple people and they were from different generations?
What percentage or how would that add up? So, for instance, if we have 1 third great-grandparent,
1 fourth great-grandparent (not necessarily that grandparent of that third great-grandparent),
and 1 fifth great-grandparent. Again, all from different lines that are the closest people who
were fully Ashkenazi Jewish. How would that look and what percentage could we expect
from that? Well, let's pull the fan chart up and just plot out what this is. So we
have here. We have a third great-grandparent. We have over here a fourth great-grandparent. And
we have over here a fifth great-grandparent. Now, obviously the parents of each one of these people
that are identified in the pink are going to be Jewish also. But we are only concerned with
the latest fully Jewish person that we're getting that DNA from. So it gets halfed to this person
and then half again. And then half to get in half, to get in half again. And the same
with all of these. What does this add up to? Let's go back to our chart and take a look at
the different percentages. Now, we have 1 third great-grandparent, 1 fourth great-grandparent
and 1 fifth great-grandparent. in this case, it's actually just adding up the math. So we start with
3% from that 1 third great-grandparent. We add a 1.6%. So that's going to be 4.7%.
And then we add another 0.8%, so that's going to be 5.5% from this combination of these three
ancestors. Except that is the average. That is not necessarily what every single person
that has this three combination is going to get. Because if you'll remember, I also had this chart
on the video. Now, this chart goes through and it actually gives you a range of percentages that
each one of these relationships could be. Let's narrow that down to the ones we care about third
great-grandparents, fourth great-grandparents, fifth great-grandparents. And we see this range in
order to figure out what range our hypothetical is. We actually have to add all of the
low ends together and that'll give us the low end of the range. And then we have to add all
of the high ends and that will give us the high end of the range. So remember, with this 1 third
great-grandparent, 1 fourth great-grandparent and 1 fifth great-grandparent the average was 5.5%.
When we add these together what we see is we have a range that could be anywhere from 0.7% to 15.5%.
And that means that our 3% that we were looking at is right there within it. It's a little bit
less than the average but it is certainly possible to have from that combination. On the other hand,
if we look at this top end here. Well, 15.5% you may be thinking, "oh, that's like a second
great-grandparent or a first great-grandparent." When in actuality, it's three different
people from three different lines that are further back as far as your generations go.
And so, if you are stuck looking at a first great-grandparent or second great-grandparent
trying to figure out which one was the Ashkenazi Jewish person because you have a significant
amount of that ethnicity, you might actually be looking in the wrong spot. You might need to be
looking several generations back. Now, this fan chart looks really good because it is filled in
with people. In fact, there's just a few little spots over here where the ancestor is really
unknown. And so identifying specific ethnicities of ancestors might be possible in this regard.
But what if this is actually what your family tree looks like. This is from another side of
my family. And you can see there's actually a lot of big gaps. In fact, there's whole sections where
it only goes back a couple of generations and then it's unknown. In this case, you might have
your third generation here that's one generation removed from your last known ancestor. You might
have your fourth generation over here which is three generations removed from your last known
ancestor. And you might have your fifth generation up here which is two generations removed from your
last known ancestor. In this case, trying to use the ethnicity results to identify specific
ancestors is going to be a lot more difficult if not impossible. And that is simply because
we have a lot more research to do in order to identify these people that are the intermediaries
between that ancestor before we even identify that ancestor. I told you it gets more complicated. And
I've shown you a couple of ways. But let's delve into another example. And so far, I'm only using
a examples with three different ancestors that are all contributing to this ethnicity result
that you had. What if we actually go back one further generation? So before we were
looking at a third great-grandparent, a fourth great-grandparent, and a fifth great-grandparent.
Remember the fifth great-grandparent doesn't even show up on that fan chart because there's just not
enough room. So what if we actually start with a fifth, and we add a sixth, and we add a seventh
great-grandparent? I can't show you on the fan chart because again none of them are actually on
the fan chart. But we can go back to our table and we can take a look at some of these percentages.
Once again, to figure out what range we could expect from this combination
we add up all the low ends and we add up all the high ends and that gives us our ultimate range.
So in this case, somewhere between 0 and 8.1%. You'll notice 3% still falls within that.
We could have a fifth, a sixth, and a seventh great-grandparent that are all contributing to
our Jewish heritage and it only be 3%. But we could also have it be as much as 8%
or on the flip side we might not have any Jewish ancestry showing up on our ethnicity results.
But because of how far back those ancestors are, maybe they're starting at the fifth, sixth,
and seventh generation. They didn't actually contribute any DNA to us and so we end up
with 0%. And that's what I mean by it starts to get complicated with only three distant ancestors
contributing to this specific ethnicity. We actually might have 0% or may have as much
as 8%. Now, if we were focused on that 8% and looking for a second great-grandparent,
because that's right around the range that a second great-grandparent would be,
we would be three generations removed from the first person who actually is that. And
actually five generations removed from all of these people who were contributing to that.
So when we asked the question. Well, how far back is should I be looking for an ancestor that is 3%
of my ethnicity? We really need to know whether or not this is one person contributing or multiple
different ancestors contributing. And if it is multiple ancestor contributing,
well, how many of that multiple? Because the more that are, the further back they go. And in the
conclusion of that other video, one of the things that I was showing was also from a year standpoint
how many hundreds of years these ancestors could be back in relation to a general genealogical time
frame. When we talk about multiple ancestors, we're again going even further back and so
the likelihood of actually finding records for many of these ancestors is not that good. So as a
caution, I would say don't get caught up in trying to identify specific ancestors when we're talking
about this really low percentage. Because you may not even have the records to do that and you may
be running down this rabbit hole that is wasting your time. One of the things I would focus on is
looking at your tree and seeing where those holes are and trying to fill them in. Now, in doing that
research, if you happen to find information that helps support some specific ethnicity
that you have in your results, great! But I wouldn't use that as the focus of my research.
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If you want to learn something more about DNA, then check out this video right over here.